

Students paying to get internships? - kunle
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html?src=tptw

======
alexsb92
Waterloo University has the biggest coop(internship) program in the world, and
it has had the program since the university's inception in 1957, and the
program is required for all their Engineering students and optional for the
other faculties. In Engineering, all students alternate between school and co-
op usually every semester, so the length of the whole degree gets extended to
5 years, with 3 full years worth of studies, and 2 full years worth of
experience.

The way it works is that the co-op department, CECS, has an internal job
posting website, where students view jobs, and submit their resumes and maybe
cover letters. The employers will then look at the resumes and decide on the
students they want to interview. Most interviews happen in interview rooms in
the CECS building. If the employer cannot attend, then Skype or phone
interviews are arranged instead. After the interviews, both the students and
the employers rate each other 1 through 9, and the students get automatically
paired with the job where the sum of the ratings is the lowest. CECS
constantly contacts companies to get them interested in hiring uWaterloo
students. Companies that currently hire uWaterloo students include FB, Google,
MSFT, Apple, all the big banks in US and Canada, Qualcomm, RIM, and tons of
other medium and small companies including Allerta, which HN has been hearing
about quite a bit, and which is currently employing me. In terms of job
locations most jobs are in North America, however there are quite a few in
Japan, Germany, NZ, Australia, UK, and students can set up their own jobs if
they don't like what's offered through CECS.

Now about salaries, even for a first work term engineering student the range
is $12-$22.50 with an average of $15.94. CECS requires that employers pay the
students. Until now however there were few exceptions: start-ups were able to
discuss with CECS to see if they could offer unpaid internships, however
that's now being phased out. If the company can't pay the students with money,
it is now required to pay them through other means such as equity.

The latest Earnings Information for uWaterloo can be found here:
[http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_...](http://www.cecs.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/Hourly_Salary_Information_2010.pdf)

On another note, I think having all these internships spread out, is better
for us, students, since it allows us to try out different type of jobs. Once
semester you can work for a start-up, while the next one you can work for a
big corporate.

EDIT: Even humanities students get paid however relatively less than say,
Engineering.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_In Engineering, all students alternate between school and co-op usually every
semester, so the length of the whole degree gets extended to 5 years, with 3
full years worth of studies, and 2 full years worth of experience._

From what I've seen(my undergrad had a similar program), this is actually a
very bad deal for many students.

If you do coop, you pay roughly the same price as a 4 year student. (Typically
you pay fees in the semesters you are working.) Your financial aid is
significantly reduced, since you now have income, so you might even pay the
college more money. 5 years after starting college, employers will consider
you a better than average fresh grad. (I.e., your salary on graduation won't
be ordinary graduate + 2 years worth of pay raises.)

In contrast, if you graduate in 4 years, maybe doing (usually paid, but even
unpaid) summer internships, you get more financial aid. 5 years after starting
college, you are an engineer with 1 year of experience, and with a
commensurate pay raise.

If you work as hard as coop students, you can even graduate in 3 years. This
considerably reduces your costs, and at the end of 5 years, you have 2 years
worth of pay raises under your belt.

~~~
chrisbennet
_In contrast, if you graduate in 4 years, maybe doing (usually paid, but even
unpaid) summer internships, you get more financial aid. 5 years after starting
college, you are an engineer with 1 year of experience, and with a
commensurate pay raise._

In this economy, it's not usual to graduate in 4 yrs and not be able to find
work in your field - even with an engineering degree. The guy with the
internship experience under his belt is going to have an advantage in this
situation.

Employers these days don't want to invest in training "entry level" employees
so getting experience (even if you have to pay for it) is sometimes the only
way to get your foot in the door.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Is 3 summer semesters of internship or summer research that different from 6
semesters? When I graduated from college (right after the dotcom bubble
burst), I didn't observe any real gap between coop students and regular ones.

The coop office also refused to publish any numbers (in spite of being asked
repeatedly), so I suspect there wasn't much of one.

Caveat: this was 9 years ago, and not at Waterloo. But even a few years ago
(back when I had students), it seemed like the only people who couldn't find
work were the people who weren't very good. Will internship experience help
you if you bomb a technical interview?

~~~
alexsb92
Well it probably won't help you if you bomb the interview, but at the same
time, chances of bombing the interview are considerably lowered, since by the
end of the degree we would go through 30 if not even more interviews, so you
should have a feel for the type of questions they ask.

------
SandB0x
This only really applies to humanities students. Take a degree in the natural
sciences, engineering, CS or mathematics and you may find that people are much
more willing to part with money for your services.

~~~
Deutscher
I must have done something wrong then. I graduated with a Masters degree in a
traditional/hard Engineering discipline (GPA ~3.5) in 2008 and worked as an
unpaid CAD monkey for 6 months. I submitted more resumes than I can remember
for full-time positions, but didn't even get a single interview call.

I am now gainfully employed, but doing nothing related to my
undergraduate/graduate education.

~~~
nphrk
Is this Germany (judging from your username) ?

~~~
Deutscher
No, USA.

------
ShabbyDoo
These $ <= 0 sorts of internships seem concentrated in fields where social
capital is highly valued -- politics, PR, talent management, etc. Could it be
that young people from upper class backgrounds are the most likely to possess
the social skills and pre-filled Rolodexes required to be successful in these
industries? Even if this is not true, it is certainly possible that the head
of a PR firm from a wealthy family could not imagine it otherwise. I also
wonder if, in addition to no pay, the price of the internship is actually
negative because of the reciprocity expected from the social connections used
to secure the internship for the recent college graduate.

I am imagining a voice mail like this:

"Hey, Joe [the VP at the PR firm which represents Large Company X], this is
Bob, [the internal head of PR from Company X] calling. Would you mind doing me
a favor and taking a pass at my niece's resume? She's interested in PR and
would love the opportunity to do an internship with you guys this Summer. The
pay isn't as important as the experience, and she can stay in her aunt's
apartment on the Upper East Side. It's great that we do business together.
Talk to you later."

How much has Joe "paid" for his niece's internship?

~~~
gallerytungsten
You're on the right track. Rich kids can afford to work for free.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
More than that, it may be that the families of the affluent implicitly pay for
their kids' internships.

------
z2amiller
This hits close to home for me. My wife is currently going through the process
to get a one-year internship to for her psychology doctorate, which is
required for graduation. Having to pay for the privilege is an understatement
- her university counts this as a 'class' so the tuition cost for her to turn
in some paperwork at the end of the year will be about $3000. In addition,
with gas at $4/gallon, there'll be about a $200/mo commute cost for the next
year. So far the internships she's looked at pay a $5000 stipend for the whole
year.

Of course that pales in comparison to the cost for child care for this year;
most of the child care we've looked at in the Bay Area is ~$1700/mo, so her
internship is going to cost us about $20,000.

I don't see this system changing anytime soon. As it stands, there are fewer
internship slots than there are students. Because it is so competitive, my
wife has already been declined by two agencies which had openings directly
related to her thesis. I already don't understand how more placements aren't
willing to get nearly-free labor, so forcing employers to pay some kind of
minimum wage for interns will only reduce the number of slots available to
students. Indeed, in addition to all of the indirect costs (child care, etc)
we would gladly write someone a check for her to have an internship in the
area so that she can finish this year. If she is deferred because there are no
placements, it is another year before she starts a "real job".

~~~
grav1tas
While the price tag is pretty bad, at least she'll be ending with an advanced
degree. Some of the people in this article had comparable liabilities but were
going to wind up with undergraduate degrees. I hope it works out for you all,
regardless.

------
ShabbyDoo
Imagine that you have an opportunity to "bid" on the right to be a waiter this
evening at Masa, the NYC $400/plate (not including alcohol) sushi restaurant.
You are an experienced waiter and expect to average 18% in tips on 20 plates
served over the course of four hours. Presuming that no one orders alcohol,
that's $1440 or $360/hour. If there were no labor laws and Masa really had a
free market system such as this in place, it would be rational for a waiter to
pay a great deal for the right to collect these tips given that there are few
opportunities available to make this much money relative to the supply of
capable servers.

I see the internship market as similar. How much is it worth in future
earnings to directly observe "how the sausage is made" in a Senator's office?
To watch a PR mogul operate after Client X is caught on video grinding up cute
puppies in a blender? There are many more people who could profit later from
these experiences than there are internships to dole out. It is only the
relatively constrained supply of good software engineers which prevents Google
from charging for the right to spend a Summer there (not that I think it would
even if it could).

~~~
antiterra
I think you're missing what's actually happening here. In these cases, the
students are paying the university for a "registration credit," in order to
legalize work without pay. The provider of the internship does not receive
this money, and the amount is, more or less, arbitrarily decided by the
academic institution. The amount the student pays is therefore cushioned and
abstracted from the sort of market forces you describe.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
I agree with you, but my point was only that paying (or simply taking a loss
by paying rent in NYC for the Summer) might actually be rational on the
student's part. Whether or not the firm receives the payment makes little
difference to me in this case although I do appreciate the distinction. My
comment about Google charging certainly could have led one astray.

------
uscfan1781
It's also important to understand how the internship dynamics change as you
progress through the four years of college. Getting a paid internship after
your freshmen or sophomore year is extremely difficult. Very few large, "name
brand" companies include freshman and sophomores in their internship programs.
Those that do typically have ratios along the lines of 90% juniors, 10%
freshman and sophomores.

The catch is that landing the junior year internship in large part depends on
having at least one previous relevant internship. That leaves most freshman
and sophomores struggling to find internships at local businesses in their
field of interest. Most of the businesses don't have an actual internship
program, have no idea what to do with an intern, and don't have the money to
pay one even if they wanted to.

This describes the experience of me and 95% of my friends at Duke over the
last 4 years. Many of us have awesome, extremely high paying jobs lined up
after graduation, but we got those jobs as a more or less direct result of
working for free after freshman or sophomore year.

My personal experience: Freshman summer: part-time job to support myself, took
a summer class, did a lot of (free) work for Duke Student Government Sophomore
summer: 3/4 time job as a waiter in a restaurant to support myself. Spent all
my free time programming. Junior summer: awesome internship at Microsoft.
Post-grad: offers from Google and Microsoft, trying to start my own company.

Basically over the past 20 months or so my pay has gone from ~$6/hr part-time,
to ~$75 full time. Trust me, I am not 12-13x smarter, more valuable, or more
skilled now than 2 years ago. The system is broken.

Although I never had an unpaid internship my ability to land a paying one
after junior year was dependent on the projects I worked on in my free time
the previous summer. And that is in the tech industry, which is in by far the
best shape. The internship situation in other field (as SandBOx mentioned) is
much, much worse.

~~~
mdwrigh2
I'm an NCSU student, so I'm in the same area, looking at mostly the same jobs.
What I found is that most students just aren't willing to go through the work
to find a job. They want the jobs to be posted somewhere online, so they can
fire off a resume they spent a couple hours making (if that). I actually
managed to nab a development / systems administration internship straight out
of high school for a company out of Durham, mainly because I met one of the
management at the company and just asked about a position. I spent two years
working for that company (paid, part-time during the year, full-time over the
summer) and then a summer and a semester doing [paid] research at NCSU. This
summer I've got an internship lined up with Google.

You're absolutely right that a lot of it is dependent on finding internships
early on, but I don't think its necessarily that companies aren't hiring
underclassmen (though MS, Google, etc. likely aren't), but rather that a lot
of students aren't willing to go the lengths to _find_ the job. Not all of
them are posted online. Go to your local PUG/LUG/*UG/2600 meeting, and ask
around. Most people there will be willing to talk about one with you if you
seem relatively competent and willing to learn what you don't know. Plus, as
you said, doing projects in your spare time is a HUGE plus. A lot of the
things I end up talking about in interviews are side projects that I've done.

Though I'll put the disclaimer that this is all only applicable to the tech
field. Unfortunately, other fields don't have it as nicely as we do.

------
phamilton
Mark Cuban has a lot to say from the other side of the coin. He tried to set
up an unpaid internship program and was denied by their legal department.

[http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-
internship...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-
so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/)

~~~
earl
Yeah. Having to pay people when they work for you. What sort of crazy shit
will people dream up next?

~~~
phamilton
I think you missed his argument. He isn't saying "We want to take advantage of
interns." He's saying that there are a lot of interesting positions and
projects which frequently are scrapped because they are not financially
viable. He wanted to offer these positions to unpaid interns, giving them
press passes and full access to the resources they need. Either they turn into
financially viable projects, in which these interns have a job prospect, or
they become a valuable bit of hands on experience for a resume.

~~~
antiterra
A valuable bit of hands on experience working on a failed project considered
too risky for a big-time entrepreneur to waste minimum wage on? Sign me up.

~~~
phamilton
Sounds like a lot of open source software.

~~~
bugsy
True, but with open source at the end of it you have the right to continue
using what you created. In this other case, you are gifting the value of your
work to the corporation irrevocably and retain no rights.

~~~
phamilton
But you also get to slap that company's name on your resume. Never having been
in a hiring position, I'm curious as to which sounds better:

"I worked on OpenOffice.org providing support for a specific file extension"

"I worked for Microsoft as an intern. I built support for a file extension in
Office 11, though it was not used in the final product."

While the first statement has the value of "Let me show you what I wrote", I
don't think the second statement is anything to scoff at.

~~~
bugsy
Microsoft doesn't have unpaid internships, nor do they have internships you
have to pay for. Nor does Google. Do you have any examples of technology
companies with great reputations that charge students for internships?

~~~
phamilton
Nope. Just trying to draw an analogy. Journalism is a very different ballgame.
The concept of high profile open source journalism is non existant.

My question wasn't about whether they were paid or not, it was about whether a
scrapped feature is still valuable resume experience.

The logic chain is this: If a scrapped feature is still valuable resume
experience, then working on a project not deemed worthwhile by a corporation
is still valuable experience. If it's still valuable experience, there may be
situations in which it is beneficial to take such an unpaid internship.

The whole argument here isn't whether or not to pay interns for such a job.
It's already established that they will not be paid for such a position.
Either unpaid interns do it or nobody does it. End of story. The question is
whether or not to allow people to pursue such an opportunity without pay. I
think there are many people that would benefit from such an arrangement. Not
just students, but with the high unemployment rates, anyone trying to gain a
little more experience or get their foot in the door.

~~~
bugsy
Someone doing work with no business value for another party doesn't make much
sense to me. Sure perhaps it benefits the worker in some way. Perhaps he
learns the value of coming to work on time and obeying arbitrary orders to do
work that everyone agrees is useless and unneeded (which is the premise you
have made - I am presuming it for the sake of argument here). I postulate
though that it would be even more valuable experience to do work that everyone
agrees is useful and needed. It's not like there is a shortage of that. In
development, there's tons of valuable software that needs to be written. The
state of practice in this industry is quite poor, especially of much corporate
produced software titles compared to indie releases. Why not write valuable
software instead of useless when there is so much valuable software to write?
Writing useless software for the purpose of experience seems a not optimal
choice when one could just as easily write useful valuable software.

And now, given that one is writing useful valuable software that is of benefit
to others, of course the developer should be paid for their work.

~~~
phamilton
yes but is that true in journalism? (The topic Mark Cuban is discussing)

Software development is unique in that there are no real barriers to entry.
Rather than take an unpaid internship writing code, I can write code at home.
But what he wants to provide to aspiring journalists is a space in the locker
room after games, access to practices, players and coaches, etc. That's very
different.

Also, the premise wasn't useless and unneeded. It was not financially viable.
In Cuban's article, he mentions plenty of reasons why it would be useful. But
they aren't enough to justify the cost of starting such a project.

------
AN447
In the U.K the Conservative Part were auctioning internships in several
prestigious organizations. One Crispin 'I make money' Odey offered a week
internship at his Hedge Fund for £5,000.

Its quite common. Personally, I have used my own personal contacts to get work
experience. But when you involve money into this matter you are just creating
more of a gulf between the rich and poor.

It is extremely common across all the industries in London. Very unfair.
Media/Journalism is the worst culprits of this.

------
nkassis
There are other options, in Quebec they have a couple of universities doing
co-op programs where students work (paid) half time and go to school the other
half, the schools find prospective employers and work out the duties the
students need to perform. My cousin did this for his architect internship,
this is a required part of his program, he needs two semesters like this to
graduate. He had a positive experience and made a decent amount of money at
the same time.

I took a different route, while in College (in the Florida) I worked full time
for the university as a System Adminstrator/Software Developer. I gain 4 years
of experience doing it and only pushed my graduation a year back or so. It was
hard, work sometimes clashed with school but right after I graduated I had not
trouble finding work (I decided to leave the University to explore new stuff,
4 years in one place can get boring :) ).

I would never take an unpaid internship because it's obvious that A) you don't
learn anything filing papers all day B) it's obvious employers use this to get
free labor even if they aren't supposed to, of course in the tech world we are
lucky enough that self learners can quickly get jobs based on skills only. Not
so in the other professions I guess.

------
kongqiu
Particularly in the humanities, journalism, and social science fields, where
most internships are poorly paid (if paid at all), a prospective intern needs
to have enough of a financial cushion to both pay their expenses while not
earning money at a paying job. This selects for students from higher-income
families. Paying for an internship spot sounds like the next logical step
under the current system. The question is, how can we level the playing field?

------
yaks_hairbrush
Takes a lot of guts for a company to say "Pay us so that you can eventually
work here." And it's such a tough time for young folks these days that they
essentially need to take the deal or run the risk of not finding employment
after college.

~~~
patio11
If you read carefully, the scenario appears to be "Pay university based on
number of credit hours applied to degree" + "Get credit hours for internship".
The student is not paying the company.

My alma mater put a similar rule in place regarding study abroad: credits
transferring from study abroad programs would be charged at the university's
standard rates regardless of the cost of the underlying program. (This was
effectively a wash for me, since Japan was a high-cost option, but it was
highly detrimental to folks who would e.g. use a year in Israel or any of a
few African destinations at $5k to get a year of credit which normally cost
about $40k.)

(There is another scenario, in which students -- well, rich parents -- pay
brokers to arrange internships for e.g. DC governmental institutions. Someone
I know works at one such broker, where commercially reasonable best efforts to
find a placement cost about $10k. She's deeply conflicted about their business
model and is quitting soon largely because of it.)

~~~
kd0amg
The article definitely said Dream Careers was selling internships to students.

~~~
phamilton
Those weren't their own though. Dream Careers is like an unemployment agency
for internships. You pay them a fee and they find you an internship. They even
figure everything out for you (housing, travel, etc.).

------
venturebros
I opted out of the internship during school for various reasons. I graduated
about two weeks ago and landed an unpaid internship.

I know there are plenty of paid internships out there but companies that offer
those do not understand what an internship is or are looking to take
advantage. All the paid ones I have seen want you to have either advance
knowledge in the subject, x years of experience, and/or previous work history.

~~~
burgerbrain
What field are you in may I ask? Because it sounds like the exact opposite of
what I've seen for CS; extremely well paid, and _very_ understanding about
expected skill levels (as in, I was easily able to land a very good, and well
_ish_ paid position after merely my freshman year)

~~~
venturebros
web development

~~~
burgerbrain
Have you considered taking other sorts of CS positions? It's pretty messed up
if companies expect you to do development work for free...

~~~
venturebros
I'm not in CS, i'm an interactive media person trying to switch over to
advanced front end development.

It does suck but I am not going to complain I have nothing on my resume so
something is better than nothing.

------
ShabbyDoo
Imagine that a group of good software developers were assigned to pick 10
interns out of a pool of 100 applicants for a role at a Facebook, Google, etc.
(substitute any software organization which attracts a great applicant pool).
What's the probability that most of the ten chosen will be regarded as top
engineers ten years from now? I argue that it's pretty high because raw talent
is easily measured by skilled practitioners. One or two might have marginal
careers because they're flaky or have other, non-technical issues, but the
odds of securing a good intern pool from which to hire are quite high.

Are the skills required to be a good lobbyist, talent manager, etc. so easily
measured in young people? An internship program wouldn't be terribly valuable
for Google if only 1/10 interns were regarded as potential hires after a
Summer of observation. What are the implications of such relative randomness
on rational behavior on a firm's part w.r.t. internship programs?

------
TheBoff
As a first years CompSci undergraduate at Cambridge, I've found more or less
the opposite of this: it seems like I've suddenly become really recruitable.
Despite the fact that I'll have only had a years CS tuition, and no industry
experience, I've managed to get a well paying internship for the summer.

------
antiterra
In cases where a student can earn academic credit and not just a certificate
for the internship, it could be a worthwhile investment. The student has to
pay for those credits anyway to graduate, and real-world experience can
provide educational benefits unlikely to be gained in a classroom.

If, on the other hand, the university or college does not give genuine
academic credit but simply notes it on the transcript AND they charge for that
notation, it's likely a bum deal.

------
RandallBrown
makes me glad I'm in the tech field. Most of my non-CS friends were amazed
that my summer internships paid as much as they were going to make after they
graduated.

~~~
jjm
After you subtract the cost of the credits, how much are you left with? Hourly
rate?

~~~
kd0amg
In my case, $500 went to the university (less than what they'd normally charge
for the two credits), which works out to about a 42¢ decrease in my hourly
pay.

------
tsuyoshi
In third world countries a similar dynamic is common for government jobs. For
a job where you can collect a lot of bribes, you will usually have to pay to
get the job in the first place, and also kick back a certain portion of your
income to whoever you got the job from. In this case you are paying to merely
add to your resume, which in a sense is even worse than being an underpaid
third world government employee.

This is really a consequence of the very weak job market we have now. You can
see some people here commenting that they have no problem getting well-paid
internships, but this is only true for people who are at the top of the heap,
in terms of attractiveness to employers - there are a lot of such people who
read Hacker News. Relative to the population at large though, it's a small
percentage of the population.

------
Alex3917
"Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, [...] sold
credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the
arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for
as much as $9,500."

I hadn't heard about this before, but it's an interesting model. Perhaps some
day we'll literally be able to trade academic credits like commodities.

------
jharjono
in Canada, a CS undergrad can expect to get a paid internship with about CAD
$40,000 annual salary (thought that may varies on where you do your
internship, which year you're in, where in Canada, etc).

CS undergrads here know that and hardly any of them would go for any unpaid
internships.

