Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Leah Swank hopes this will be the last summer she spends without a full-time paying job.
Swank, Topeka senior, is majoring in journalism and working at two unpaid internships this summer. Although she has a part-time job at night, she said she still had to make a tough decision between making more money to help pay off loans, or taking the unpaid internships that would help build up her resume.
“I’m excited because these internships are giving me experience with jobs I eventually want to have a career in,” Swank said. “Even though they’re unpaid, I have faith that because I did them, it will make it easier to secure a job next year.”
According to a 2009 Vault survey on internships, 64 percent of college students said they were offered a full time job at a company or organization after they interned there. The survey said to think of summers as special opportunities to further job experience, because the few extra thousand dollars made by taking a better-paying job was not worth passing up the opportunity to further experience.
Black and Veatch, an engineering firm in Overland Park, typically hires about 100 paid interns in the summer, 10 percent coming from the University. Linda Lea, media relations, marketing and communications manager, said the company had hired 60 to 70 percent of their interns for full-time opportunities, following along the same lines as the national average.
Vault surveys found that about half of all internships were unpaid, which leaves some people wondering whether the experience and possible opportunity for a future job make them worthwhile .
Sam Greenberg, Highland Park, Ill. senior, is majoring in chemisty and said he was lucky to have found an internship with Jayhawk Plastics in Olathe that paid well. He said he wanted to step outside the box and expand his knowledge in jobs he had zero experience in.
“I like working here just because I’ve learned a lot about myself with this internship and it’s opened new ideas to me, like the actual work it takes to be environmentally friendly,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg said that although he didn’t plan on going into the plastics industry, he felt as if the opportunity had allowed the important networking and connections he would need after he graduated. Besides the additional experience to put on his resume, Greenberg said his internship could show future employers his broad experience in a variety of work-place settings and help him get ahead of other graduates.
Paul Koch, the O. Maurice Joy Professor of Business, said he thought it seemed unfair to not pay some nominal amount for services of a student in any internship. However, he said that because economic times were hard right now, companies ought to be free to offer unpaid internships to any students willing to come after weighing the costs and benefits of the experience.
According to Aramark, the 19th largest employer on the Fortune 500, nearly one-third of all employers reported that higher salaries were offered to interns compared to other new college hires. It also said 75 percent of all college seniors had had at least one internship before graduation.
Erin Wolfram, assistant director of internships at the University Career Center, said that even though the UCC didn’t keep track of how many students applied for internships, it did post about 1,000 internship opportunities in its database each year. She said she recommended that students take any internship they think would help build transferable skills and help evaluate a career field, whether paid or unpaid.
Wolfram said the experience the student would be able to add to their resume, talk about in an interview, or use to decide a career path, would ultimately make it worth it.
— — Edited by Steph Schneider
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