Kay M. Hymowitz writes in The Wall Street Journal that internships prevent students from gaining valuable life experience:
This means that internships are largely for rich kids–and therein lies another problem. The menial summer job gave many kids their first paycheck and the feeling of independence that came with it. It was also inherently democratic. For eight hours a day, at any rate, working-class and middle-class kids were in the same boat. They all had to learn that life wasn’t always entertaining. They had to wait tables for people who could be less than polite–people who sometimes reminded them of themselves. With many of them in four-year colleges (where close to 75% of their classmates come from homes at the top quarter of the income scale), without a draft and now without menial jobs, privileged kids almost never meet up with their less well-off peers.
Hymowitz is correct, to a small degree. If a student never works a low-level job and interacts with people of various classes and ethnicities, then the student will indeed never learn valuable lessons that are important in today’s globalized world. Middle-class and rich students also need to realize that they can never take their situations for granted.
However, there is a time and place to learn these lessons, and there is a time and place to begin focusing on one’s education and career in an increasingly competitive world. As Anya Kamenetz wryly points out, Hymowitz, whose daughter is interning at a teen magazine, “won’t make her own daughter [work menial jobs instead] because she might not get into Harvard!”
For much of my childhood, I grew up fairly poor. I won’t go into the details, but for my first three years of high school, I worked twenty to thirty hours per week at part-time jobs including food service, movie theaters and even telemarketing. I didn’t have the luxury of wanting to learn life lessons; I simply needed the money.
By my senior year of high school, my work as a reporter and editor on the school newspaper made me realize that I wanted to be a journalist. And I knew that the industry was highly competitive. So I got a job at the local daily newspaper. (The full story is in this post.) This set my future career in motion.
When I went to Boston University to study journalism, I knew that I would need to gain as much additional practical experience as well. And this is where the internships that I gained were invaluable.
I was an intern at The Beacon Hill Times during the fall of 1999. I was editorial page editor of BU’s Daily Free Press in the spring of 2000. I became a paid, full-time, editorial assistant in the Metro department of The Boston Globe from May to December 2000 while balancing a full courseload that fall as well. (My experience and contacts there enabled me to become a freelance reporter for the Globe later.) I was an intern for The Patriot Ledger in Massachusetts from January to May 2001, working full-time on Saturdays and Sundays while balancing coursework. During my summer abroad in London in 2001, I was an intern for TNT magazine while also taking classes and working as a bartender on the side. All of this experience, particularly my time and clips from the Globe, directly led to my first journalism job out of college as a staff reporter for The Boston Courant a weekly newspaper in downtown Boston.
I write this not to tout my own experience — many other BU classmates were more active and experienced than I — but to state that it is possible for students to have the best of both of the worlds described by Hymowitz, provided that they work extremely hard and do not spend all of their time partying. I worked menial and professional jobs for years, and I learned from each of them.
During my time as editor and then executive director of Spare Change News, I hired three interns. Two of them have become successful (the other, I believe, is still in college). One, Paul Rice, became managing editor and then editor of the newspaper after scooping the Boston Herald on what was perhaps the most significant story under my tenure. He is now a freelancer for the Seattle Times. Another intern, who worked for us while she was in high school (and while working a menial job), made it into Cornell University. I’d like to think that I had something to do with their successes, but the truth of the matter is that their drive and initiative is what propelled them.
Internships can be invaluable, as long as students work hard to get the most out of them. In today’s business climate, they are also essential. The other type of education described by Hymowitz, though important, can be obtained earlier and elsewhere.
