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Internships

I recently read an article by Matthew T Hora from Inside Higher Ed which goes into great detail of why campuses should not require students to take internships before graduation. In his article, “Internships as a High-Impact Practice” Hora states, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to proceed with caution when advocating for the widespread adoption of internships. Recommending or requiring that college students have them can be premature, inequitable and potentially dangerous.”

As someone who spent countless hours applying, interviewing and working at various internships, I do agree that this is a problem. Even as a business major, I went out in search of opportunities despite not needing an internship for graduation because that’s what everyone says to do. When I say everyone I mean everyone. My parents, teachers, advisors, family, and sometimes my coworkers at work had long conversations with me about internships. However, not all of those people realize how easy it is to find yourself in an internship that’s about as useful as a screendoor on a submarine. 

After mentioning that internships vary greatly from paid to unpaid, time lengths, or supervision levels, Hora goes on to say, “The second reason is that too many campuses are not prepared to offer and monitor safe, high-quality internships. Some institutions in our nationwide College Internship Study do not have adequate staff to perform the quality control needed to ensure that internships aren’t simply a requirement to check off -- or worse, a shady if not illegal arrangement with an unknown employer.” This is where Hora and I agree, but to make the reasoning why I’ll tell you a story of my first internship experience. 

One day I noticed a production company looking for a Marketing Intern on the Kutztown University Career Network (KUCN has now been replaced by Handshake) and I applied because I applied literally everywhere from KUCN listings to random internships on Google. I got a couple of bites and interviews, but nothing that turned into anything concrete. Then I heard back from the head of a production company, and his response was basically to come immediately, no interview necessary. 

Looking back, this was the first clear red flag (and I still felt that way then, but was urged by my parents to go anyway) that this ‘internship’ really wasn’t going to be educational at all. For the most part, he was really just looking for young students to give him and his son ideas for a new TV series, movie, or documentary.

The only two people who worked there were the owner and his son, so calling them a production company was a stretch. They had a gigantic office inside the converted church and most of it was filled with clutter. Other than the two of them, they had ‘hired’ six interns in total including myself. 

I say ‘hired’ because no interns got paid, but I guess when you’re not paying interns you just go with however many you want instead of a reasonably sane number. So every day I was there,  we sat around and researched various ideas from books that were coming out soon. Once everyone was ready we presented what we found to the owner and his son, but this only happened once a week at best. 

Usually, there would be someone missing, or I would come too late in the day so they would do it without me, and after we “presented” he would let us leave. So I would drive all the way there (about 45 minutes from Kutztown) to spend less than an hour doing anything and then leave. On the days we didn’t get to immediately leave after, the owner of the production company would lecture us on various random subjects dealing with producing media. Admittedly, this was the most interesting thing that he did, but since I was a business major he expected that I knew every legal term for anything you could possibly think of. He would regularly get annoyed when asking me questions about liability insurance, contracts, or abbreviations of legal terms that I had no idea what they were. 

Instead of just telling me like any sane person might have done, he would get increasingly more agitated until I found the answer on Google. To this day, I’ll never understand why he thought that my business degree included a law degree as well, but that’s what happened. 

Most days I spent talking to another one of the female interns, who spent more time there than I ever did, and occasionally he would buy everyone pizza. In a nutshell that was that entire internship. Can I say that I gained useful knowledge or experience from going there at least twice a week? Nope. Would I use this experience on a resume? Nope. 

So when Matthew Hora states, “unfortunately, too many institutions don’t have the infrastructure to ensure that all internships are, in fact, high-impact practices,” I get that. No one should have to listen to a slightly psychotic old man get agitated at them for not knowing every legal term in existence. 

That being said, I don’t agree that they shouldn’t be mandatory or that most don’t offer any real value to students. I have had internships since then that are valuable and not requiring students to gain real-world experience will just make getting a job after college more difficult. 

But there is no promise that every internship is a worthwhile experience. It’s up to students and advisors to work together to ensure that the time spent working an internship is valuable. Open communication with students is an important piece of the puzzle as well, but Hora explains other options as well, “to increase the prospects that an internship is truly a form of experiential learning, career services offices and departments need staff members and routinized procedures for recruiting and screening employers, ensuring that an educational component exists in students’ work, and for monitoring and evaluating students’ experiences and performance.” 

In my own experience as an intern, I’ve learned that internships that are paid usually have some sort of structure, or system involved to ensure that you are actually doing valuable work. If a student is applying to an internship that doesn’t have clearly defined goals, that may be a sign that it’s not going to be educational at all as well. I believe being aware of these potential problems could help ensure that students can find internships that help them in their future careers. 

~Samantha Tice, APSCUF-KU Intern Fall 2019

Works Consulted: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/09/23/campuses-should-proceed-caution-when-it-comes-student-internships-opinion