So, unpaid internships suck, but what is truly amazing is that people are not only happy to work for free, they’re now paying to work:
“When Roz Tuplin graduated in 2010 she thought that a post-graduate degree in English Literature would be good grounding for a job in the media.
She knew she would have to gain work experience, but after a year of trying to get a placement, she has decided to pay employers £65 a day to let her through the door.
Ms Tuplin, 23, from Wirral, will be paying £260 for a four-day work experience placement with a TV production company in London.”
I don’t know what the dream job for Ms Tuplin is, although I hope she realises the oddity of getting a job to earn money to pay for a job which might get her a job to start her chosen career while her youth ticks away. But I can’t see a connection between having a post-graduate degree in English Literature and working in television. I’m not in any way an expert in these matters, but if I ran a production company, I wouldn’t be hiring someone who had an MA and a four day work experience placement to show for their five years of adulthood. I’ve never applied for an internship because I’ve never had time to do one – I’ve been continuously busy with education, volunteering, politics, activism and personal projects since I left school in 2007, and as I hope this website shows, my CV and employment prospects hasn’t suffered for it.
Another article on paying for internships has this horrifying story:
“Sheila Miller, Albuquerque, says her daughter, Amber, couldn’t find the internship she needed to complete her degree in emergency-management planning at a Texas university. To jump-start their daughter’s career, Ms. Miller and her husband dipped into the remainder of Amber’s college fund late last year to send her to Fast Track Internships, a Highland Village, Texas, consultant founded in 2005. For $799, the firm helped her polish Amber’s résumé and cover letter, identify 133 target employers and mail them all letters and résumés. Amber soon received 15 calls from employers and last week took an unpaid internship with a city police department, writing their emergency-response plan.”
And that, I think, is the heart of this strange new trend. If you are choosing to pay someone £500 to write your CV for you and find potential employers for your very specific and high-paying skills (over your own university’s free careers service, which has an active incentive to find you a job that looks nice in their statistics), when there are hundreds of websites that will help you to do the same for free, the problem is possibly not that there’s a tough job market, but that you’re boring. So boring, that not only will employers not pay you, but they don’t want you using up their air either.
Why then, are you not already doing that career, and demonstrating to employers that you will not, as one friend put it “stick your hands together with the Pritt Stick”? I think anyone who has ever looked into making money online will know the emphasis that every single business site puts on blogging as a way of garnering attention for yourself, but that’s not necessary. If Roz Tuplin wants to work in media, why isn’t she making media? If she wants to make television, why isn’t she making television? My friend Jamie does, and sufficiently well they actually got a commission out of it. What looks better, internship or paid work?
Well, I agree with what you wrote, but not with all of it. Regardless, it is all great material. Thanks!
It’s impressive that you are getting thoughts from this article as well as from our dialogue made at this place.
i’m paying for an internship in graphic design. though im going for an interview, i’m more into the experience it’ll give me rather than the fee. because essentially, paying for an unpaid internship will cost me time, but costing me money as well? well, that’s just an education but with a small twist -it’s actually in the industry rather than a school. it’ll look hyper on my resume ;)
we’ll see how it goes tho, dunno if it’ll be good.
How did it go?