Unpaid internship

[Crashoran]

I'm a part-time student that has been searching for a part-time job for the past several months, and I've only received one offer for an unpaid internship. My savings are running low..

Do I take the unpaid internship and get some experience in my field of interest or sit around between classes looking for a job?

I could tell the employer that I could intern but if I get a call for an interview and land I job I would have to leave, that seems reasonable..

The commute is also ~20 miles, which would also hurt me

[ldelacruz]

What field?

[dmora]

Definately gotta do what ya gotta do.

Take the internship, but keep looking. I wouldnt say anything about looking for other work till they hire you.

Also make sure the internship is with a legit biz.

[Crashoran]

It's with a company very similar to Mpix, as an image specialist

[ldelacruz]

What is an image specialist? Why not work for Walgreens's, Best Buy or Walmart and get paid?

[toverman]

Is this unpaid internship something that really interests you? Does this company have a history of eventually hiring former interns?

If money is the main issue, I have to agree with Lonnie. Sounds like it will end up costing you in gas and lost time during which you could have a part-time job somewhere and gain valuable people experience.

[Crashoran]

Originally Posted by ldelacruz

What is an image specialist? Why not work for Walgreens's, Best Buy or Walmart and get paid?

I've applied to all of those including almost everything else out there

[toverman]

Originally Posted by Crashoran

I've applied to all of those including almost everything else out there

I feel your pain on that one, too.

[TeamTwin]

Internships, though unpaid, are a great way for a potential employer hire a new grad. The internship exposes you to their company culture, the employees (who will no doubt, provide feedback to managers and HR folks about how you performed), and perhaps your future boss. So don't make a determination just because it's unpaid, make the decision based on if you would want to work there as an employee.

[dminton]

Unless you're living on mom and dad's credit card (which I know Nick isn't) then unpaid internships are ridiculous. And they've gotten out of hand recently especially for photography students. Used to be that an unpaid internship meant once or twice a week someone showed up and learned a few things, basically like a shadowing gig. But now they've transformed into free labor. And if you're showing up full-time hours and actually producing something, then you deserve to get paid.

[TeamTwin]

"I'm a part-time student that has been searching for a part-time job for the past several months, and I've only received one offer for an unpaid internship"

Well I don't consider a part time job and an internship equivalent. It's like comparing apples to oranges. When I did my internship, I had an opportunity to learn new skills and apply what I learned in school into practice. At a job, I believe that part of getting that job is that you have the skills, experience, education that the employer is looking for, and therefore, you're paid for it.

Bottom line do what works for you. If you think that it's essentially a chop-shop and they use interns as free labor without ever hiring them, then I would keep looking.

Good luck!

[HotHolly]

agree with Michael and David. David brings up a good point. Internships should give you skills you dont have now to help you get where you are wanting to go. I hired our 1st intern. she's been working with us for years now. that was also a REAL internship. we taught her a ton of crap and had weekly meetings to go over her progress and things i wanted her to learn. some were so she could work with us later, some were b/c of her degree plan. internships offered through colleges are usually monitored so you may not just be a pack mule.

i also think that its a stepping stone. right now jobs are hard to come by. i also wouldnt tell the company that you would accept their internship until a real job comes along. they wont hire you. your internship IS a real job, just like it is a real internship.

about your other job applications that are out there. keep following through. kids usually get jobs through people they know. hiring is rarely done by looking through a stack of papers. use any connections you have to get a paid job, if you cant afford to do an internship. you can also ask the company what their policies are on internships and hiring interns. if its the company that i think it is, you should have your foot in the door to snag a job after the internship.

[dminton]

My griping is mostly aimed at my field, newspapers, where way before the economic mudslide and newspaper nose-dives, they were beginning to change a lot of the available internships from poorly paid to unpaid. BUT at the same time, they upped the workload. Whereas used to be that a poorly paid internship meant that you would have a few (1-5) assignments a week and a lot of hanging out learning stuff, the new unpaid internships are ,in a few cases, asking interns to work 40+ hours a week and have several assignments a day. In other words, taking on the same full load that their staffers have. That is insane.

Even the tiniest papers in the middle of nowhere used to have students from across the country apply to them for internships because they paid just enough to have somewhere to live and enough to eat. Now they have unpaid internships and the only ones who apply are local people because no one can go and work somewhere for no pay. It hurts the students and the papers. And it only makes competition at other papers that still pay much much more competitive.

[hieuu@comcast.net]

I would't take an unpaid internship thats just not ethical with those companies, If you work you should get paid. Even if it's only minimum thats the right thing to do. Even if it had prospects of hiring you on. Would you want to work for a company that didn't pay some of the employees?

That is unless the company was a Not for profit than i would consider it.

[bondarnes]

I always expected a lot from the interns I used and they got a lot in return. I never paid an intern for their first two weeks or more. During this time I was explaining stuff like, "This is a hand held light meter and we use this because it is more accurate than the one in the camera." But usually by week three they were productive enough to get minimum wage.

I have had over a dozen interns over the years and by the end of their summer internship all but one of my interns could do a complete session on their own. I know that at least a couple of them started their own business and were eventually better than me.

So an internship is a trade-off. I get free or cheap labor and they get valuable real world photography training. Most of these were college students and they were just happy that they got additional education that they didn't have to pay for. And the fact that I paid them was a bonus.