For college students, unpaid internships can still pay off

The average college intern is paid $16.33 an hour.

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — Thomas Kemeny applied for an unpaid summer internship at a top-rated ad agency in Florida after graduating from Columbia College in 2005.

The aspiring copywriter, now the real deal at San Francisco’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners, was thrilled then to work for free.

“There’s a little bit of a psychological twist going where they [imply], ‘We’re so good we don’t have to pay,”’ he says. “You think, if the law of supply and demand works and they can pay me nothing, how many people must want this job?”

Yet in plenty of talent-hungry industries, the supply-and-demand principle works in the intern’s favor. Big companies that hire lots of young workers recruit as many as 75 percent of them through internships — extended tryouts, really.

“It behooves them to pay their interns because they don’t want to sour them on the company,” says Edwin Koc of the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Ninety-three percent of the association’s members offer paid internships, and they pay surprisingly well. The average is $16.33 per hour for an undergrad, a rate that approaches the national $17.24 average for hourly workers who make up four-fifths of the work force.

Employers not only are paying up for good interns, they’re identifying future ones at ever-younger ages — as early as freshman and sophomore years.

Jennifer Cavanaugh, an audit partner in the Chicago office of accounting firm Grant Thornton LLP, remembers a sophomore interviewee lapsing into speech more appropriate for a buddy.

“Dude, you have no idea,” she recalls him saying. “Then he kind of gasped and said, ‘I just called you dude, didn’t I?’ If I was interviewing a senior and they did that, I’d have a hard time with it. But if they’re a sophomore, I’m going to let the rope go out pretty far.”

Competition is tough for such top-rated internships. In fields such as social service and the arts, unpaid learning stints are still the rule. Some colleges offer stipends so students can afford to take them.

Lee Svete, University of Notre Dame’s career development director, suggests being flexible. “Create your own internship by proposing a project,” volunteer your services and take a paying job at night, he says.

University of Illinois finance major Brandon McArthur, a junior, took an unpaid internship last summer at an investment advisory firm one hour’s drive from his family’s Elmhurst, Ill., home. Then he found a paying job at a building supply store to keep his gas tank filled.

His project involved developing a marketing plan that the firm funded. Two of 23 friends, acquaintances and family members that he persuaded to come to a promotional event signed up to be clients. It seems the firm got the better deal, but McArthur doesn’t view it that way.

The internship was “absolutely” valuable, he says. “Not only was it something I learned from, I had something I could talk about in interviews. It was also good practice for working decorum. It was the first job I ever had where I went to work in a tie.”

Kemeny jokes that “if you do anything at an unpaid internship, you’re already overworking.” The Florida ad agency appropriately discounted his free labor by giving him chores nobody else wanted to do, such as grabbing lunch for busy people, but he managed to wrangle better assignments.

He got assigned to one project by sticking around until midnight when people wanted to go home and volunteering to help. “They were like, ‘Give it a shot,’ “ he recalls.

Did he feel exploited? “Kind of but I think it was mutual. I was using their name [on my r sum ]. I think that it’s part of the game.”

Elise Kidd, a University of Illinois graduating senior, knocked herself out at paid internships at two big employers over two consecutive summers.

“While I had the opportunity to learn and grow I really had to watch myself because it was like a three-month interview almost,” she says. “I had pressure to perform the best I could do and to [outperform] the other interns.”

For a project analyzing shift work, she got up at 4 a.m. to arrive at a distribution center to set up cameras by 6 a.m. The two-hour drive home in rush hour ended her 12-hour days. “That was stressful,” she says.

Her employers tried equally hard to impress. Interns got free tickets to sports events, river cruises and time off for professional development.