I started looking for summer internships yesterday. Yes. You read that right. Summer internships. It’s October 23. I’ve been called a serial over-achiever before. Nothing new, nothing different and definitely nothing surprising. Yet, even I, in reflecting on yesterday’s activities had to see this as being just a little bit ridiculous. Perhaps my actions were less a reflection of my personality type (read, disorder…) and more a symptom of a far more interesting and somewhat distressing and puzzling change in our society.
The question must be asked though: just how insane was I being? Ask most university students, especially journalism majors, and they’ll explain that they too have already started thinking about next summer, and for those who are really on the ball, have actually sent out a few applications. I have a friend who has six applications due Nov. 1. For me, as a junior, this summer stands as one of the most important internships I will have as a college student. This internship opens the door to possible future hiring situations.
Fifteen, even 10 years ago, no one really put a premium on internships the way we do now. Journalism has always used the experience index as a way to determine hire-ability. Our clips, or writing samples, are our lifeline. The better your clips are, and the more you have, the more likely you are to land that primo job.
So what happened? My only thought is that as more and more people have started to attend college, there needs to be a new standard set for what makes someone more desirable as a new hire over someone else. They could have the same degree, the same GPA, the same extracurricular activities, and yet one of them has done an internship. They have experience. Right there, the company is going to save valuable time and money training the person to do the job.
There’s another side to the internship coin, to be sure. Taking on an internship provides students with the invaluable opportunity to test-drive their career choice. It happens, more often than not, that a student accepts an internship, completes it and then changes their major. The job wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, and now the student has saved themselves the trouble of graduating with that degree and getting stuck with something they’d rather not be stuck with.
Other countries have only just started to understand the internship craze sweeping America. The organization I worked for in London had only just started accepting interns a few years prior, and my supervisor admitted she thought it all sounded a bit like slavery. She had to be convinced to hire me, not because my credentials weren’t stellar, but because she just didn’t get it. Why would someone want to work for free? It wasn’t until I got there and explained to her how important job placements like this are in the United States did she start to understand, however minimally.
It’s an odd phenomenon that we’re being forced so quickly to face the future and determine our career paths. Granted, that is what college is about for the most part. But it’s a startling call to reality when two months after one summer has just ended you’re forced to occupy yourself with planning for the next or be left out in the cold, er, heat?
Cross posted to Reporting to the Public Good (JCM 300 class blog)
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