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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm in a different field (science).  I mentor unpaid interns during the summer. Some come with fellowships but others not.  I'm lucky if they produce a single piece of usable preliminary data in their 8 weeks in the lab. I write them letters for medical and graduate school of they did a good job. When I interview for paid positions or graduate school I do not consider anyone who does not have at least 1 summers worth of experience and a good reference from that experience. I think the students fair much better than I on this arrangement. The are getting a free educational opportunity, mentorship and a foot in the door. [/quote]

I certainly agree in science and a lot of other professional fields. I mentor law students and run internship programs and we consider an intern to be stellar if they do more useful work during a summer than they cost in terms of our management and mentoring time. An average intern is roughly a wash and a bad intern is a net loss.

Folks who act like all unpaid internships are abuse have it wrong. The test right now correctly focuses on whether the internship is providing real non-monetary value and is not being offered mostly for the benefit of the employer. NIH internships and law summer jobs seem like very clear cases where it can be appropriate not to pay because they provide at least as much if not more value to the student than the company. Some corporate internships, such as Madison Avenue internships, seem very clearly the opposite because interns gain no meaningful connections and spend their days photocopying and doing other tasks that most companies have to hire someone to do.

Political internships are a tough case because the work interns do really is helpful; you need people to knock on doors, make phone calls, stuff envelopes, etc. and an intern can do that almost as well as a veteran staffer. So the campaigns clearly benefit. But at the same time, so do the volunteers, who do build important knowledge and connections that will help them in the future. Plus there's arguably a civil and public benefit to helping campaigns educate the public and getting more of our younger citizens to have tangible civics experience. So I can see the arguments both ways.[/quote]

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