I can barely believe my ears. Only two days on the job and already my boss tells me that I will be attending a gala for the United States Navy along with 600 other guests, many of them prominent politicos and celebrities. I’ll have to be red-carpet ready and mingle with Medal of Honor recipients and members of Congress.
Not only that, but I’ll also be reporting on the event for a national magazine — and that includes an interview with legendary comedian Bill Cosby.
Having been weaned on Cliff Huxtable and the rest of The Cosby Show antics as a kid, I can scarcely contain myself at the thought of it. My boss, unaware of my gobsmacked expression, rattles off details as if this is just one of the many menial tasks he hands out on a daily basis.
A few days later, I’m still starry-eyed as I hold a voice recorder up to an aging but irrepressible Cosby. “I was in high school at age 19. Even I recognized I was beginning to look as old as the janitor,” Cosby joked as he explained why he decided to enlist.
Glitzy, demanding, fast-paced — such is the life of an intern in Washington, D.C.
This past fall, I joined legions of students and recent graduates in the ever-expanding world of interning, where the competition is fierce and the compensation is little to non-existent. While the abuse of the intern is often decried — I heard it referred to as “highly educated slave labour” on more than one occasion — what exactly does it mean to be one? And why are more and more young people coveting a position that is not quite volunteer, not quite employee, but instead stuck in a state of limbo between both?
“The word internship is really vague,” says Lauren Friese, founder of TalentEgg.ca, a Toronto-based career website for students and recent graduates. “In a country where programs like co-op programs are very popular, it’s even more vague because those are essentially internships too.”
For some, I discovered, photocopying and coffee runs fill the day. For a few, like Tuscon’s Daniel Hernandez — the 20-year-old congressional intern who performed first aid for his boss, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, during the recent shooting rampage — the demands of the position transcend the boundaries of conventional employment. But for most, an internship provides a flexible means of testing the waters of employment.
“That’s one of the good things about an internship — it’s not a theoretical thing,” suggests Roger Gillespie, an editor at the Toronto Star who heads up the newspaper’s summer and one-year internship programs. This year, he received over 200 applications for a dozen spots in the summer program.
I managed to land an internship (the all-too-common unpaid kind) at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, a city sustained largely on the backs of the thousands of interns who work there every day. Having never before experienced intern life — let alone in America’s diplomatic nerve centre — I quickly became accustomed to D.C.’s unique intern-oriented version of the “work hard, play hard” ethic.
Once an anomaly, Washington’s workforce model is becoming standard practice as a growing number of youth seek out internships in an effort to gain experience and give their resume some clout.
In the United States, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 50 per cent of graduating students in 2008 had held internships, a remarkable jump from the 17 per cent found in 1992 in a similar study by Northwestern University. The culture has expanded so much so that television producers of The O.C. and Gossip Girl fame are currently working on a new series about intern life.
Although not as pervasive, the trend is catching on in Canada.
“In the past year I’ve seen an overwhelming interest from students,” says Tasleem Hudani, the work experience coordinator at U of T’s Career Centre. “Graduating students are looking for internship opportunities to bridge their undergraduate degree with full-time work experience.”
Employers, too, are spotting the benefits as they hire eager twenty-somethings willing to work for little or no pay, frequently on tasks once reserved for full-fledged employees.
“Organizations are catching on to student demand for internships and are capitalizing on it by creating these positions,” Hudani points out.
“There are a lot of employers now that have almost changed their entire recruiting strategies to just recruit interns,” adds Friese.
Traditionally reserved for industries like journalism and international development, the intern has become a staple at law firms, government agencies, and even small businesses. In extreme cases, applicants are shelling out for the opportunity to intern — without compensation. Last summer, an internship at Vanity Fair was auctioned off for $2,900 while one at Vogue went for a whopping $42,500.
“Paying to work” may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it is one that nevertheless speaks to the mounting importance many are placing on internships as a way to break into a career. “Internships have become the gateway into the white-collar work force,” one former intern recently told the New York Times.
“It’s a good opportunity to get experience where maybe there were other avenues for doing so in the past that are not available anymore,” explains Amy Kishek, a fourth-year student at the University of Ottawa, and a fellow intern in Washington, D.C. “There are fewer and fewer jobs for young people, even at entry-level positions.”
As Kishek points out, unemployment rates remain high amongst youth. According to Statistics Canada’s latest release, 26,000 more jobs were added for youth nationwide in December 2010, an improvement that quickly pales in contrast to the demographic’s overall unemployment rate, which still sits at 13.8 per cent compared to the national average of 7.6 per cent.
Any field experience, even unpaid, is becoming more and more attractive in the eyes of Generation Y, or what Maclean’s recently dubbed “Generation Screwed.” With a waning job market and a generation of baby boomers determined to remain in the workforce indefinitely, youth are searching for anything that sets them apart.
In order to gain a foothold in journalism, recent U of T grad and The Varsity alumnus Chris Berube interns without pay at the Walrus magazine, while also working three part-time jobs to support himself.
“It’s hectic because you put in a full day of work at this internship, then you have to turn around and put in another half day of work somewhere else,” Berube says of his schedule, which — in addition to his editorial internship — includes freelance writing and administrative work at an engineering firm.
“I’ve had to work throughout the entire time I’ve done these two internships,” he explains, having also completed an unpaid stint at Eye Weekly magazine. “Even then, I know coming out of this [that] I’m going to be bankrupt.”
The steady growth in unpaid internships, in particular, has become a lightning rod for debate, not only in Canada, but also south of the border. In states like New York and California, regulators have been forced to reinterpret the legality of allowing interns to work without compensation. The debate between employers and labour departments had become so recurrent that the Obama administration stepped in last April with six criteria stipulating when unpaid internships are permissible.
“It’s a big hot topic. Is it right to hire people for free, especially if you’re in the for-profit sector?” Friese tells The Varsity. “[The issue] has been around for a while, but I think people are just taking note of it because it’s happening more.”
Hudani warns students to be wary of the label. “There are some organizations that are taking advantage of the economic situation. They’re recognizing that students will take on an unpaid position; they’re labelling it as an internship opportunity to make it sound more attractive.”
“The key there is whether or not the program is approved by a college or a university. If it’s not approved by a college or university, you should be paid,” says James Fyshe, a specialist in labour law with a legal practice in Hamilton, Ontario.
As Fyshe explains, Ontario’s Employment Standards Act guarantees certain basic rights, including a minimum wage, for all employees in the province. A few specific groups, including training programs approved by educational institutions, are exempt from the Act. As Fyshe sees it, if the internship is completed for university or college credit, monetary compensation is a non-issue.
Friese, who takes on interns at TalentEgg.ca,
agrees: “From that perspective as a student, I don’t think there’s any ethical issue there. As long as you’re getting academic value — value that helps you achieve your career goals — I don’t see why it’s wrong.”
However, many unpaid internships are going to recent graduates who are no longer affiliated with an educational institution. According to Fyshe, “these placements are an invitation to obtain cheap or free labour, which is contrary to the law.”
At the Toronto Star, where the paid internship program has been in place for decades, Gillespie adopts a different perspective. “There are the cynics who say this is just free labour. It’s not free labour; interns are a lot of work,” he says, noting that even paid internship programs are often a burden on employers in terms of training and time.
“It’s a question about paying back something,” explains Gillespie. “The only way the industry continues, the only way new people come in, the only way you continue to exist and get smarter and better and faster and all that is when you are passing it on to the next generation.”
Despite this mutual benefit, Fyshe predicts that if the legality of some unpaid internships is brought to court — an unlikely occurrence, as interns fear being blacklisted by possible employers — it will effectively open a huge can of worms. “It’s a complicated issue,” he states, noting that compensation is only a small portion of a debate that could also include considerations like occupational safety and workplace harassment.
For Kishek, the question of compensation is murkier still. “It does entrench a lot of biases,” says the fourth-year political science major. “There are huge segments of the population who wouldn’t be able to get their foot in the door.”
Even so, Kishek considers her own internship at the Canadian Embassy in D.C. — which, she admits, far exceeded her budget — to be an invaluable experience. “It was like applying the theories I had learned in the classroom. I could never have gotten that from the University of Ottawa listening to a lecture,” she recounts.
The “invaluable experience” trump card is one played again and again by current and former interns. Despite the ghastly rent prices and constant ramen noodle dinners, in no other capacity than an internship could I have interviewed NATO generals and legendary entertainers, chatted with members of Congress in their offices, or flown in an F-35 fighter jet simulator. Certainly not with only one degree under my belt and little experience to my name.
According to Friese, if you can afford to cover your costs, an internship should be seen as “an investment.”
“The alternative to after-grad internships is often grad school,” she says of the post-graduate dilemma. “A lot of people say, ‘I can’t afford it.’ But when the alternative is grad school, I don’t buy that at all.”
While some would contend that the undergraduate degree is losing market value by the day, Berube considers the time after graduation ideal for trying on an internship, if for no other reason than to see how the career might fit.
“The time after university, especially if you don’t have a very clear sense of what you’d like to do next, is the time to do things like take up an internship in a field you don’t know very well,” he concludes. “You can fail a lot because that is the right time to learn from mistakes.”
With the unbound optimism of an experienced intern, Berube insists that “you have nothing to lose.”
