The internship: Dead or alive?

I’ve both been an intern and supervised interns and I have some thinky thoughts on internships. Reasons I’ve been thinking about internships:

An instrument of intern torture

• I saw “The Internship” this weekend (cute movie! I love that kid from “Teen Wolf”)
• Just got a new intern at work Monday
• There are rumblings that unpaid internships may be on their way out: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/06/14/is-the-unpaid-internship-dead/

My time as an intern
Now I have a burgeoning life regret that I went into a creative a.k.a. competitive field, but let’s just put that aside for a moment. I was actually paid for my internships (not well, but still) so I have less room to protest job duties that don’t exactly work within the guidelines that internships should be strictly educational. In one internship, I spent almost all of it putting together binders full of materials; there was some editing, too. In another, all I did was write articles, which was is more educational/portfolio-building but didn’t really give me NEW experience. On the whole, I’m not sure where I come down on whether those were incredibly useful experiences or not. My real job during those times, at NAU, gave me much more responsibility and experience and it was paid. It’s difficult to know how much weight employers put on those internships of mine—whether they’re just mildly interesting line or make up a strong thread in the fabric of my career.

As an intern supervisor
Holy crap do we work our interns hard! I am so grateful for the ones I’ve gotten (shoutout to Kelly Potts!) and they’ve made a huge difference in my workload. I try to give them portfolio-building assignments but don’t always succeed. I hope that these experiences are enriching for my beloved interns, but I also realize that paying your dues is a huge part of being an intern. None of my internships were even remotely likely to lead to a job and our interns will also not be offered anything full-time (or part-time); much like a degree in a non-professional subject, internships seem to be a standard way to prove that you can stick with something mildly unpleasant and with few immediate rewards for a very long time.*

*A semester is a long time when you’re young. Now that I’m old, a semester seems like roughly the blink of an eye.

Why internships?
If nothing else, I think the value of internships and other low-paying, kind of crappy work is that it makes you appreciate the people who do that work FOR you, in the future. And that is a valuable outcome. Truly.

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