Mary Churchill, writing from Boston, USA.
Within the context of higher education, internships and other forms of experiential education have increased dramatically in the last decade. Particularly noticeable has been the increase in unpaid internships. As the academic summer quickly approaches in the U.S., talk of internships is in the air and there has been quite a bit of press on the issue of unpaid internships. There is much concern over the vulnerable position of unpaid interns. Students in these ‘volunteer’ positions have very few rights and are often afraid that complaining or quitting will hurt their chances for further employment and future networking and opportunities and they’re right.
In mid April, Anya Kamenetz (author of DIY U) wrote the following in the Huffington Post:
“For any ambitious young person today, they [internships] are a critical part of personal development and preparation for careers.”
Two weeks earlier, a New York Times article had stated:
“Many less affluent students say they cannot afford to spend their summers at unpaid internships, and in any case, they often do not have an uncle or family golf buddy who can connect them to a prestigious internship.”
Building on these statements, I think most of us would agree with the following:
- Internships, coops, and experiential education experiences are crucial to connecting higher ed to the real world.
- The experiences students gain are essential to the development of social and cultural capital.
- This is even more so for students who are not from wealthy white backgrounds (the power elite).
- Small nonprofits and entrepreneurial start-ups often provide some of the most rewarding internship experiences and often provide interns with more meaningful work.
- Small nonprofits and entrepreneurial start-ups can rarely afford to pay interns.
- Students from working class backgrounds can rarely afford to accept an unpaid internship
With first-generation college students, we often have a situation where the students do not have connections through wealthy family and friends and need to build their own career networks. They are often unlikely to take the steps necessary to make that happen.
I speak from personal experience. As a working-class student at Michigan State, I was extremely fortunate to have been identified by some amazing mentors. However, they were proactive with me. At different points in my undergraduate career, two key women talked me into participating in experiential programs I would have never have considered without their firm push. Many working-class students lack the self-confidence and extroverted personality that facilitates proactive mentoring from others. In my own classes, I am often drawn to the quiet yet brilliant students who lack self-confidence or the mouthy and defiant students who have not figured out how to channel their energy and creativity. I have talked many working-class students into taking an unpaid internship or a coop that pays less but offers more hands-on experience and access to better social networks. This is after I have talked these same students out of the immediate short-term gains from a higher-paying waitressing or bartending job.
This is where the institution plays a crucial role. Internship and coop counselors may need to give the extra effort in talking working-class students into unpaid opportunities that provide rich real-world experiences and access to networks that are crucial for future career opportunities. Institutions need to recognize the financial hardships of these students and find ways to financially incentivize them to take advantage of opportunities.
Many institutions in the U.S. are implementing learning communities and structured freshmen year programs for first-generation college students. While the majority of these programs focus on academic success and retention, career counseling must also be a crucial component.
Every staff member and instructor at an institution has the potential to play a key role in a student’s life. Each of us can teach Johnny how to network and make him part of our networks.
(Editor’s update – As a follow-up to this post, see Don’t Let Students Get Lost in the Internship Shuffle! by Mary Churchill and Leanne Doherty Mason at The Boston Globe link here)
Sources:
Greenhouse, Steven. April 2, 2010. “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not.” The New York Times.com. Link here.
Kamenetz, Anya. April 16, 2010. “Time for Illegal Internships to Come out of the Shadows.” The Huffington Post. Link here.
Milburn, Caroline. April 23, 2010. Desperately seeking new set of skills. The Age.com. Link here.
US Dept of Labor. ADVISORY: TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT GUIDANCE LETTER NO. 12-09. Link here.
The Other Lobe http://www.otherlobe.com – Blog on the importance of experiential education
Mary Churchill
Denise M Horn
Heather Alderfer
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ITIR TOKSÖZ
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sharedpast
Johnny Can’t (Net)Work, but neither can Dr. Jane
As academics (especially in the humanities), we are trained to network as academics, in order to be academics. Conferences are spent meeting other academics, creating valuable links that will either lead to jobs or academic collaborations (which lead to jobs). We shouldn’t waste or time meeting people outside of academia, heck, outside of our field, because what good would that serve?
We work (as pointed out by a recent article http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/24/krebs) as teachers or researchers inside our discipline and sometimes even more narrowly in our specialty. Why work outside of what we are training to do?
But most importantly, we use social networking as an extension of the first two “networking” opportunities: to promote and connect our narrow research (and thus career) interests. How many articles about looking for academic work remind newly-minted PhDs that talking about kids or hobbies on facebook is a no-no, lest a hiring committee think you aren’t dedicated to your research 100% or, once you are hired, wasting your time on frivolous activities like family or your health? Facebook and Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Linkedin and Adademia.edu) have become another non-networking opportunity, another chance for graduate students and PhDs to show how narrowly focused and single-mindedly dedicated they are to their research.
So how is Dr. Jane supposed to advise Johnny how to network to his benefit? Johnny needs flexible skills, adaptable to a variety of different jobs and demands, and the ability to connect and communicate with a variety of people. Dr. Jane knows how to narrowly present herself to a unique audience of like-minded individuals. Is it any surprise that students aren’t well-equipped for our present economy?
(Cross-posted at collegereadywriting.blogspot.com)
Lee, you are right on target with this. I’ve been wanting to write for some time now on how unprepared most academics are for advising students on real-world concerns like work. Here’s an example: A few months ago, I invited to my campus the CEO of a nonprofit on whose board I sit. The purpose was to introduce the CEO to members of the campus community who might be interested in collaborating with the CEO on just the kinds of experiential learning opportunities that Mary discusses above. We also wished to discuss the possibility of joint research and other common efforts. One faculty member attending the meeting asked if the CEO could visit the campus again to speak to the faculty member’s students about how to search for a job and what it is like to work outside of academe. On the surface this sounded fine, but then the faculty member, looking rather timid, added that she had never before had a job other than teaching and research, and for this reason, felt ill-equipped to advise her students on life outside of the classroom. I found this to be horribly sad, and a bit tragic. Here, we have brilliant individuals who have attained the highest learning badge there is (the doctorate)and have very little by way of useful information to share. They do not even know how to apply outside of their own fields the knowledge they have worked so hard to acquire. There is something very wrong with this picture.
(Cross-posted at http://onworknprogress.com/)
Onworknprogress – thanks for visiting and the comments. I’ll cross-post my response on your blog as well.
Several elements come together to create a situation where faculty members are ill-prepared to advise students on “real-world” issues like getting a job. In the past twenty years, I have seen the following changes: 1-tuition skyrockets and student/family expectations as well (wanting more bang for the buck- understandably so); 2-one of those expectations is that their investment in higher ed will get them a job that where they will earn money to begin to repay their astronomical student loans; 3-the student’s realization that they don’t know how to get a job and their turn to the higher ed institution for assistance; 4-growth of career services on campus (ideally). This is the trajectory and perspective of the undergraduate student. Over in the PhD programs…you have the following: 1-faculty mentors who were ‘trained’ to become faculty members with the majority of the focus on research rather than teaching and zero focus on networking and job searching (outside of the narrow space of the academic conference circuit); 2-rapid increases in numbers of PhD programs and numbers of PhD students (helps to retain quality faculty members thru engagement and helps with reputation/rankings); 3-strong focus on recruiting top PhD students and little focus on completion and career services (there is an underlying thought that only the strong survive/finish their dissertations and only the best get tenure-track jobs). Although newly minted PhDs would have loved to have received professional development that focused on “real-world” alternatives to academia, at best, they have received training in research and perhaps some in teaching and they are now entering the market in droves and finding very few tenure-track positions.
I strongly believe that we need to change the way we recruit and train PhD students and junior faculty. We need to teach them to be savvy about the skills and knowledge they possess. We need to train them to market themselves outside of academia and I do believe that this capacity-building has to begin with PhD students and junior faculty. However, as higher ed institutions move towards using increasing numbers of adjunct/contingent faculty, institutions focus their efforts on growing their career services and experiential education programs, leaving faculty members on the side (in the dust, less necessary). I could go on forever on this topic.
For me, the bottom line is that capacity building needs to begin in PhD programs and in junior faculty mentoring programs. I find this to be crucial for women and other groups that are under-represented in the senior leadership/senior faculty levels at institutions.
(Cross-posted at http://onworknprogress.com)
Others are taking a broader view
“The GPS Panel has done Canada a real service. It has focused on what matters: building Canada as a nation of innovation and knowledge exchange; challenging us to understand that we are a Pacific nation; pressing the need to help the US re-build an open border with Canada; and finally connecting to our continental partner, Mexico. The Panel has … See Moreproduced some surprising ideas, and that is good. In the past, foreign policy reviews have tended to reinvent Canadian liberal internationalism from the 1950s. This version is more attuned to contemporary realities that call upon Canada to better concentrate its energies in international development, security and specific country relationships. The recommendation to liberate CIDA from political meddling is certainly worth pursuing. Altogether, a refreshing look at where Canada might go if we were actually willing to make some hard choices.”
Stephen J. Toope
President and Vice-Chancellor, University of British Columbia
on Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked Age @TheCIC
http://www.onlinecic.org/opencanada
commentary @EmbassyMagazine
“The report’s title highlighted the first similarity: Open Canada: a Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked Age.
Both papers focus on networks, and both cite the current head of policy planning at the US State Department, Anne Marie Slaughter, who initially talked about the importance of networks in an increasingly changing world.
Diana Brydon PhD FRSC
Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies
University of Manitoba
Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies
I’d just add that with budget cuts and reductions in class offerings, it also seems that students are being advised less and less about career plans and networking, and more on how to get into the last few courses they need for graduation – whether those courses are relevant to their long-term goals or not. Advising is now too often about the number of credits a student needs and not about their career plans and how their education will help them achieve their goals. Certainly, students – especially those with few financial resources for their education – need to know how to get their degrees finished expeditiously. But I hope advising continues to include a good dose of the long-term perspective that students may forget in their rush to graduate. I too benefited from some long, insightful conversations with mentors as an undergrad that changed my career direction.