During my summers in high school and early in college, I worked in a frozen yogurt shop (Neon Lites), a bakery/sandwich shop (Big Sky Bread), and as a landscaper (Paramount Lawn + Landscape). These jobs were all about earning my spending cash and paying my dues—once I hit upperclass status (and certainly once I was in grad school), I figured that summers would be spent at lucrative and important internships.
As it turned out, none of the internships I had were anything close to lucrative, nor were any of them “important,” at least in the DC sense of the word (as in, “I’m wearing a suit and walking very quickly down the sidewalk: I’m important.”). But at least they looked better on my resume than “Frozen Yogurt Dispension Technician.” And at least I never had much real trouble finding one.
Not so for those for those internship-seeking this summer, says the Times :
School’s out for summer 2009, and instead of getting a jump on the boundless futures that parents and colleges always promised them, students this year are receiving a reality check. The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board.
This is far from the end of the world, it seems—spending one summer internship-less is, in the grand scheme, not a major career setback. And for all the griping the students portrayed in the article do about “rolling out of bed at 11,” “loafing through the day,” and “sharing a few cheap beers with friends at night,” to me this sounds like a fairly un-horrible way to spend the summer.
What worries me are the grander implications: that those students who actually need summer work to survive (whether a substantive, paying internship or a job running the rollercoaster at Adventureland) won’t be able to find it (the article cites unemployment figures for 16- to 19-year-olds as hitting 24 percent, up from 16.1 percent two years ago) and that those entering the job market right now might see their ability to earn a competitive wage in the long term suffer:
Students who enter the job market during a recession can see their wages lag behind comparable students who graduated in better times for as long as 15 years, according to a recent study by Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management.
These are things worth concerning ourselves with. Canceling a road trip to Reno or being bothered by parents who want you to take out the trash? Not so much.
Tags: Internships
I’m disappointed that you didn’t mention your college jobs (Bennigan’s, the airport, maybe others?).
Thanks for bringing those up, G. You are correct that, in addition to my bakery and landscaping experience, I worked as a server at at the TGI Friday’s clone Bennigan’s (now closed, hopefully not as a result of the many trays of perishables I dropped).
Once I did manage to secure a few summer internships, they weren’t nearly as substantive or meaningful as I hoped they’d be. I spent a summer as a “technical writing intern” at the offices of a small airline at the Greater Cincinnati Airport. The job sounded great on paper, but in reality they had nothing for me to do and I spent the summer sitting in a cubicle with no computer (which, in hindsight, seems particularly cruel—I’m really not sure how I managed to pass the time). I also interned at the headquarters of a major bank in downtown Cincinnati and spent more time in front of the copier than I care to recall.
For me, the takeaway from those experiences is that “internships” are not always the panacea for future career success that we hope them to be. If you’re internship-less this summer, this seeming “failure” might actually give you the time to do something else you’ve been wanting to do but putting off (volunteer, study a language, read more books), things that might have unintended, and perhaps even more positive, effects on your career.
Didn’t you also sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door for a few days? Or was it knives?