Melanie Sabol – Copy Editor
Internship: noun, “a student or trainee who works, sometimes without pay, at a trade or occupation in order to gain work experience,” the Oxford English Dictionary defines. “An internship is when (usually a college undergrad) goes and works for a company who can get away with paying him (her) a very small salary or often because he hasn’t graduated yet,” Urban Dictionary provides a second definition.
For most college undergrad majors – they do require some form of interning. I know for myself I have been doing countless internships for my education major, none of which were paid. For me, an internship doesn’t necessarily need to be paid in my field. Just to be able to go in and work with actual professional teachers and learning how an actual classroom operates is payment enough.
Doing internships are essential to attaining your desired career. It’s the experience that will show you whether or not you enjoy working in that field. Working with elementary students is great and shows its own rewards, but I would have never known that I wanted to work with high school students until I explored all of my options for interning.
As a senior in the elementary education department here at Southern Connecticut State University, Allison Cavallaro has also done interning for her field. “I obviously would prefer a paid internship but as a future teacher I know I will not be getting paid for student teaching. I believe students should be paid at least something for interning,” said Cavallaro. “They are putting a lot of time and hopefully a lot of effort into their internships. Times are hard and a lot of students have loans to pay off, cars that need gas and other bills. The majority of the time while you’re interning, you have no time for a job so you have no source of income. There is definitely is an upside of having a paid internship.”
Understanding where Cavallaro is coming from, the question arises – are some internships more important than others? Should it depend on what field of work you are going into that then correlates as to how much, or if at all, you should be getting paid?
Shannon Wu, also a senior here at Southern Connecticut State University, believes that internships should be paid depending on the work that they are doing. “Hospital settings, depending on what work you are doing should be unpaid. But if you are going to be doing something more complicated such as office work – I think that those internships should be paid,” said Wu. “Pay scale should also depend on what type of work that you are doing, but if you are doing it for experience, that should be unpaid. If those internships will be used on a resume that is then classified as experience work – experience work there is no need for a paycheck since you are using that to then grow in that field.”
Interning is a great part of growing up and figuring out your field. Yet, it’s difficult to work and also be an intern. If you need to work that means working on weekends and also nights, which then leaves little room for fun. If you can find a paid internship – take it! Most fields do not supply a paid internship – but yet in the end is it really about the money? Internships are meant to be the first stepping-stones in the career of your choice. Those few weeks or months as an intern I think as a college student it is okay to not be paid. You’re getting paid by the knowledge and experience that you are gaining from that time.
