Every year it’s the same story. Midway through spring semester, we all start frantically visiting CareerLAB and applying for as many internships as we can. We dream big because we are told the bigger the name, the better it will look on our resumes. We hope to get internships at magazines, banks and large corporations. Most of the time, we apply for jobs hoping for one thing, but we don’t always find the results we expected when actually doing the work.
Yet I’ve been wondering if we are looking at the right places to intern, or whether we should be interning at all. I am not advocating you sit around all summer watching TV, but at the same time, I believe there are many productive and learning experiences to be had outside of an office. Recently, there has been buzz about the lawfulness of unpaid internships. Whether they constitute a new form of slavery or not, we are entering the workforce as unpaid interns willingly. In an op-ed for the New York Times, writer and commentator Ross Perlin went even so far as to say young people need to be protected from “the miserly calculus of employers.”
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman suggests that “experience, rather than a degree, has become an important proxy for skill … and internships give you that experience.” Yet drawing from my own experience, I haven’t learned anything at an internship that I had not learned before in a class. Granted, I interned in Brazil where short-term internships are very uncommon.
I have come to believe that many of us are better off skipping the internship experience and traveling the world or doing community service. Even if those options are not possibilities, working at a local deli or restaurant will provide a more valuable experience than an office job. These experiences are more likely to push you outside of your comfort zone and teach you how to deal with the real world than working at an office will.
I worked for a large publishing company in Brazil because I wanted to learn about the process a book goes through from conception to publication. Though I did some basic editing work the first week I was there, the rest of the time I was left to my own devices— to do as I pleased because there was nothing I could help with. The work I was given was sporadic and, as soon as I handed it in, the company’s employees forgot I was there at all. I did a few odd jobs that took me no longer than 10 to 20 minutes and then read the New Yorker for the rest of the time.
I wasn’t learning anything new. I did not end my internship with a feeling of accomplishment or a sense that it had in any way advanced my knowledge of publishing. All I really gained from my summer internship was the ability to write down a big name on my resume and get a recommendation letter.
Some would say that I gained exactly what I was supposed to gain from the internship — networking. Yet I, like Friedman, believe internships are supposed to teach us something a class cannot. Regardless of the importance of the company I worked for, I cannot say that I learned valuable skills, except learning how to keep myself busy.
In an article for the New York Post, Naomi Schaefer Riley argued that unpaid internships in large companies do not guarantee us valuable knowledge that will help us in future jobs. She argued that we can learn more from working at a local coffee shop or a summer camp than from working at a large company. These are likelier to teach you “how to act professionally and how to deal with difficult personalities.”
As Riley noted, many people who went on to hold important positions later on in life did not intern at big name companies when they were still in college. The valuable lessons weren’t learned from having to sit in a cubicle doing meaningless work but from actually making a difference in their places of work and engaging with the communities in which they were working.
I could have easily done the work I did in my internship from my house. I could have easily done it by choice. I didn’t need to go to the office to read whatever I wanted to read and spend my month frustrated with the feeling of wasted time. I felt like I could have been doing so many other interesting things in the city: exploring, learning and traveling rather than going to work.
But year after year, we still believe that the key to finding the best job after college is having a list of world-renowned companies on our resumes. And yet all I have learned after this year is that a better use of my time and ability does not involve a nine-to-five job in some skyscraper downtown — wherever that might be.
I think we all need to either start changing our reasons for taking a job or better yet, simply changing the jobs we are going after. Because if I were to take another job similar to the one I did this past summer, I would do it knowing that it’s only for the name and not for the experience. A better use of my time, of the freedom given to me to learn whatever I want to learn, involves a hands-on experience. And, unfortunately, internships are simply not doing that.
Sami Isman ’15 isn’t trying to burst your bubble. She just thinks we could all be doing what we really want to do with our time.
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