About the Author:

Laura Contrucci is a senior studying visual communication design at Kent State University. Over the course of this summer, Laura will also be the Design Intern at Elevate Thinking in Columbus, OH. She shares her work and experience in her online portfolio at LauraContrucci.com.

I believe internships should be paid, or that students should at least be given a small stipend. However, I don’t have an issue with unpaid internships in an academic setting or ones at nonprofits. Last summer I interned on campus unpaid.

To land my current internship, I browsed many a job boards while searching found many unpaid ones. I immediately passed them over because it’s just not practical for me. Last summer, I was able to keep my regular job along with my unpaid internship so I still had an income. But since I was abroad spring semester my bank account only went down. This summer I needed to find a paid internship.

I extremely fortunate that ELEVATEthinking offered me one. It honestly makes me have so much respect for the company and makes me take the internship more seriously. When I received their offer letter it immediately communicated that they would take the internship serious as well and expect me to produce worthwhile work.

One reason I am wary of unpaid internship is because there is an issue of legality. According to this New York Times article there are 6 things that must happen for an unpaid internship to be okay.

“Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer ‘derives no immediate advantage’ from the intern’s activities.”

What internship exists where the employer derives no immediate advantage? Seriously…

Another issue I have with unpaid internships stems more from the university side. Many colleges require internships for graduation (mine does). Therefor they require students to pay tuition to receive credit for the internships. So students are either paying probably most of what they earned at an internship to their university. I feel like there should be some kind of discount since we are not sitting in the classroom using resources and they are not paying an instructor to teach. I realize there is some coordination and paperwork on the university’s part but why not a one time fee for students when they do their internship?

I’m not sure what the solution is. Some employers genuinely can’t pay an intern but have a great experience to offer them. Some of the best students can’t afford to take an unpaid internship so both parties miss out.

Do you agree that internships should be paid? Or do we have to ‘pay our dues’ by working unpaid internships? If you are an employer please feel free to share your opinion!