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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
    Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
        We have college and graduate school level upaid interns at my job. These are very competitive spots, despite the fact that they are unpaid. I can tell you that our organization would be PISSED at an intern that pulled this. And interns have pulled things like this because they appear to not know any better. And in response, they haven't gotten jobs here. Or we've failed to give them positive evaluations. Or we've refused to serve as future references for employers and schools, etc. Acting like this has consequences. I get that this is just a high schooler we're talking about but honestly, it's parents like you that help explain why so many young people seem to suck. They have no sense of what is professional and what commitment means. You say this is a vacation that had been planned a long time ago. You also had the dates school ends and begins again a long time ago. Why didn't you parent better in this situation? When she interviewed/applied for the internship, why weren't these issues discussed within your own family? There should have been a discussion on the impact the internship would have on her end of the year, or the start of her new year, or the vacation. And if these things were incompatible, then you find another internship or opportunity. That's your role as a parent. To teach her how to handle these kinds of decisions. You do your child no favors by modeling for her that you shouldn't plan ahead or that it's "no big deal" to make commitments and then back out.

Basic professionalism = paying people for their labor. Which your outfit is not doing. That's not professional, it's exploitative. It's also enormously inequitable.

I'm the PP who posed the original paragraph immediately above, which some people have apparently taken offense to. I certainly can't speak for all internships, but I feel like I need to correct the idiots who have commented about my company getting "free labor."  YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. [b]We get nothing, absolutely nothing out of having these interns. We are a national non-profit in DC. We offer internships for the public good. To allow young people to see a bit of how the world works when they otherwise wouldn't. To allow them to experience it. To educate them. We spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping for these internships, working hard to find amazing experiences for these young people to enjoy, and supervising them. We make up things for them to do based solely on whether it would be meaningful for them, not what we need--like a writing assignment that they can then use as a writing sample. [/b] Overstating yourself a bit?
This isn't about free labor and it's certainly not exploitative. Every year, we have a few hundred people ask to intern with us and we take our role as educator seriously. And we hope the students who come through our doors have the common sense and good judgment to value what we are giving them. But they aren't doing any "labor"--it's just extra labor for all of us. And when you have a bright, committed student it feels worth while. And when you have a spoiled brat who acts like the world owes her something for being born a special snowflake, [b]we wonder whether we should just cancel the intern program.
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Actually, I do know exactly what you are talking about, as I have interns also. Really, you need to calm down and take your meds. I know it is easy to be very jealous of these bright young students with their lives in front of them, while you are bitterly stewing in your own juices. But the interns will go calmly on with their lives, college and so on, leaving you far behind with just a mean recommendation not given burning up in your desk drawer, just a blurry memory to them of that angry lady at the internship. And you are still stuck there with your $.05 more than the interns salary and a fulminating anger. Not healthy.[/quote]

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