As an undergraduate, just about to start her final year at university it has
been drummed into my head that I can get nowhere in life without an internship,
work experience and good grades. So how is one meant to acquire all the skills
that can 'assure' you a successful future?
Well first things first, you're expected to take every opportunity thrown
your way. Essentially this is true, and why shouldn't it be? Students should
take all the opportunities that they can, so that they can broaden their
horizons and all the rest of it. However, when it comes to working for free,
should this still be the case?
As it stands in Britain, being a student means one thing: working for free.
As an undergraduate, there's no choice in the matter (except for the very lucky
few) you just have to work for free so you can get all that worthwhile
experience down on your almighty CV. And I am writing from experience here,
over the last year I've been lucky enough to have three internships, two of
which were unpaid. Unpaid work results in a dependency on your parents and your
student load. Again, I'm lucky enough to have parents to depend on throughout
my internships, but what about all those students that don't. They're forced to
turn down internships because they cannot afford to work for free! This means
that their CV's lack the experience that wealthier students have, and hinders
their job seeking efforts. Now, I don't know how you see this, but to me it
just isn't right. There's no two ways about it at the moment, you either can
accept unpaid work, or you have no experience on your CV. Why is it that
companies can expect students to work for them for free?
Well as it stands, the competition is so fierce that students are competing
for unpaid internships. So students are forced to settle for less and less
benefits because if they have the audacity to ask for any wages, they are
rejected and the next work hungry student gets the job. Furthermore, it is so
vehemently drummed into our heads that you can nowhere without any experience
that almost everyone is begging companies to let them work for them without a
salary, in some cases not even offering to pay for travel expenses or lunch. Therefore,
sadly unpaid work has become the norm. Companies expect interns to become a
part of the staff and do important, substantial work for them. Not only this
but the work they do has to be of the same standard as other staff, the
only difference being that they aren't paid for their efforts. It is because of
this that unpaid internships are accepted in our society because in our society
it there is no other way to get any experience.
This competition is not even considering the fight for paid internships,
which you can only gain if you need to have work experience in the first place.
So the cycle continues, in order to one day be paid minimum internship wages,
you have to do unpaid work throughout your years at university. The stereotype
of a poor student living on bread and baked beans springs to mind. How has it
come to the point that for an entry level job at company a student needs to
have a mass of work experience which twenty years ago would have enabled them
to gain a better job without having to have worried about doing any unpaid work
experience? In my opinion this plays straight into the hands of class division
as those who can afford to work for free (i.e. depend on their parents and
loans) can gain all the work experience they need, however those that can’t
afford to obtain an unpaid internship are left to struggle and finish university
with just a degree and substantial debt.
Arguably, this would all be worth it if the unpaid labour helped students
earn successful careers at the end of their degree. Unfortunately, this is no
longer the case. In recent news, it has surfaced that many new graduates are
over qualified for graduate jobs because of the vast amount of work experience
that they have been told they’ve needed to acquire over the past years. So
after competing for numerous internships graduates then are rejected from their
dream jobs because they're 'over qualified'. Thus graduates face the
predicament of being over qualified for entry level jobs but under qualified
for anything else, this then forces them to accept any job offered, irrelevant
of prospects. Or worse into a graduate internship. An unpaid graduate
internship is the ultimate fear for most students. This would mean accepting an
unpaid internship when you no longer have a student loan to depend on. Again,
this often results in a lasting dependency on parents because you can’t afford
to leave your childhood home.
It just baffles me why students are expected to accept unpaid work for their
labour when they’re contributing fully to a company? I just cannot see the
justification in it, especially when they’re left unemployed at the end of their
degree despite working for free. In an ideal world an internship would at some
point lead to a full time job, however it is rarely the case. In most instances,
a company will use the free intern for a summer and write a reference. This is fine,
but unfortunately proves to be of very little worth to the student. A reference
is fine but there’s the over looming question of the next student who has
triple the amount of work experience than you, because they’ve been able to
afford to accept more unpaid work. It is here that your five years or so of
unpaid labour is futile as it eventually gets you nowhere. All in all, unpaid
work is the go to and end all for all students.
So really the only question left is: what are students meant to do?
