EMPLOYMENT Students seeking internships feel crunch

Many businesses aren't offering paying positions for the summer.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Becky Levinson hopes her summer job will pave the way to a full-time position working with sick and injured children.
True, she isn't working with youngsters this summer in the staff office at the University of Chicago Children's Hospital. But Levinson, who will be a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hopes she'll be able to transform the experience into an internship next summer with the hospital's Child Life Department.
"I run errands, do filing, help coordinate resident meals, post lectures -- whatever needs to be done," said the Flossmoor, Ill., resident, who also has volunteered at the hospital. And unlike many of her peers, Levinson gets paid for this internship, earning $8.50 per hour.
Meanwhile, Nick Oggione, who will be a junior at Boston University, wishes he had been able to land a paying job like Becky's.
"A paid internship is once in a blue moon," said Oggione of Winnetka, Ill., who is working three jobs this summer to pay his way for a semester studying abroad. Oggione had an internship but quit after failing to persuade his bosses to pay him.
Welcome to the brave new world of summer internships. College students and administrators say they struggled this year to find paying positions because of the continuing softness in the U.S. economy and the high unemployment rate.
Jobless rate
Nationwide, the unemployment rate rose to 6 percent in April, with 8.7 million people unemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate is three times higher for young people ages 16 to 19, the prime years for internships.
Carrie McAteer, assistant director of DePaul University's internship program, said the school has seen a 6 percentage point drop since the end of 2002 in the number of internships offering pay.
Not only are companies not hiring interns, some are retracting job offers they made earlier this year. Altheimer & amp; Gray, a Chicago-based law firm, withdrew job offers in late April to half of its summer interns, citing the poor economy.
According to Manpower Inc., the Milwaukee-based temporary employment agency, U.S. employers, in apparent reaction to the Iraq war and an uncertain economy, slowed their hiring in the second quarter, the time when most students actively seek internships.
John Dooney, a consultant for the Society for Human Resource Management, said, "We have found that this year it is so dead in terms of hiring for interns that they are just scrambling. Companies just don't have any type of work."