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Unpaid Interns

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AustinInDallas said:
I was thinking that was a little ridiculous. PHD Interns?
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Senior friend. He's been working there for 3 years as an intern working on some top class stuff.

Apparently when he goes full time, he counts as having almost 3 years of full time experience in terms of pay scales.

He's also a freaking genius so theres that.
 
my engineering internship pay scale went from 15/hr to 15/hr + free extended living apt downtown to 25/hr

3 diff companies
 
My IT internship pays $20+/hr. If it didn't pay anything, most of us in the internship couldn't afford to participate.

A company purposefully seeking out college students for unpaid work because they "aren't going to be doing differential equations" sounds like a company that doesn't deserve ambitions students in the first place.
 
My school did co-ops (basically internships). The average was $15/hr for civil engineering. The higher end was $20/hr, mostly for people returning to the same employer. There were two types of unpaid ones.

The first was basically research projects. Students with a passion usually went towards these (I myself did, and worked a second job in industry at the same time)

The second was what you're talking about. These were taken by the students who had no other options, usually the bottom of the barrel. So with interns (in my observations), you get what you pay for.
 
An intern working from home sounds odd. Hard to learn from employees when they're not interacting with them. Just remember an internship is not for the the short term benefit of the company. Not someone to do work for cheap or no pay. It is an educational experience. The only benefit to your company should be that in the future when the intern enters the job market they need less or no training.
 
Kaiser permanente is a fucking slave house, they'd keep interns for a year straight, no pays, under the ruse of ”education”.
 
Another set of numbers for the OP:

I did two internships as undergrad. The first (where I had zero experience) paid $20/hr + $1000/mo for housing. The second paid $36/hr + $1500/mo for housing.

I got an internship after getting my undergraduate since I was going straight into a masters program. That paid $45/hr + $1500/mo for housing.
 
Bryf50 said:
An intern working from home sounds odd. Hard to learn from employees when they're not interacting with them. Just remember an internship is not for the the short term benefit of the company. Not someone to do work for cheap or no pay. It is an educational experience. The only benefit to your company should be that in the future when the intern enters the job market they need less or no training.
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Yeah that's a terrible idea. Expect an intern (or any new hire for that matter) to be completely helpless for their first few weeks. This applies even if the intern is really really smart. Getting setup in a new environment is hard for anybody.
 
Also, an internship isn't about cheap labor or even labor at all. An internship is a recruitment tool to convince a future graduate to work at your company when they graduate.
 
Leros said:
Also, an internship isn't about cheap labor or even labor at all. An internship is a recruitment tool to convince a future graduate to work at your company when they graduate.
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That's full of bull. My sister interned at Kaiser for a year for free with the hope of landing a job there, along with a bunch of other classmates, and that's all they did, worked for free. After they were done, of course there's a fresh batch of hopefuls lining up to intern for Kaiser under the same premise. Recruiting, my ass.
 
SSSnail said:
That's full of bull. My sister interned at Kaiser for a year for free with the hope of landing a job there, along with a bunch of other classmates, and that's all they did, worked for free. After they were done, of course there's a fresh batch of hopefuls lining up to intern for Kaiser under the same premise. Recruiting, my ass.
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I suppose it probably depends on the industry. Some industries are desperate for talented people, so they pay interns well and will definitely hire the good ones when they graduate. Other industries are saturated with talent, so they can get unpaid interns and pretty much abuse them.
 
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This thread makes me sad. I can't get licensed unless I do a minimum of 1600 hours of unpaid work next year. Actually, I pay them tens of thousands of dollars in order to do that work.
 
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