On Internships and Privilege

For my graduate program, I am required to find an internship and complete a certain number of internship hours.  While I am not against the idea of requiring something like this in order to put the skills gained from the program to use in a real-world situation, I do have problems with internships in general, especially those that are unpaid.

In this country, we generally have a belief that college is accessible to everyone.  Granted, not everyone can get into Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc.  In fact, some people might have to go to community college before a four-year because they aren’t academically prepared for a four-year institution right after high school. Generally, though, if someone is willing to put in the time and effort, we believe that they can eventually earn a college degree.

I would also argue that there’s also a skewed perception that since students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are somehow more likely to get scholarships or other kind of aid, it is easier for them to go to college.  Statistically, those students are more likely to be from underrepresented minority groups and are first-generation college students (students who are the first in their families to attend college or earn a BA/BS).

Given these assumptions, employers are able to comb the job market in search of employees that have earned a college degree.  In this time of sluggish economic growth and stagnant employment, employers can be even more selective when hiring. 

I am lucky.  I graduated from college in 2009 and entered a job market that was absolute crap.  However, I got a job that gave me real-world experience in a field that I was incredibly interested in.  I worked a full-time job with a salary and benefits for my one-year contract and then got a job immediately afterwards working on a political campaign.  Thanks to these experiences, I have been able to leverage a lot of connections I’ve made into new job opportunities.

Here’s where I run into problems.  Many students were not and are not as fortunate as I was.  I have heard from many people that employers are more and more often asking for applicants who are just graduating from college to have internships.  A college degree alone simply isn’t enough any more.

I understand that it’s a competitive job market.  In fact, I think that it’s good to have a competitive job market.  However, I think that access to internship opportunities is not something that is readily available to all students.  As an undergrad, I worked a part-time job during the school year to cover room and board and took a full course load.  During the summer, I moved back to my parents’ house so that I could work 35-40 hours a week at a just-above-minimum wage job and save money to cover expenses during the year.  I also maxed out the federal financial aid that I was able to get.

If I had needed to find an internship in order to become competitive in the job market, I would not have been able to do it.  I had no car and relied on public transportation during the school year.  My schedule was pretty much 9:30-6 Monday through Friday with a few breaks during the day, most of which I spent studying.  I also often had commitments on the weekends for work that would have conflicted with any internship.  On top of that, the few times that I looked for internships, I could only find unpaid positions.

This is not a unique story.  Even now, after I have a Bachelor’s degree and am halfway done with my Master’s, I am struggling to find an internship that isn’t unpaid.  Competition for local internships is fierce and anything offering compensation is even more so.  At this point, I can’t afford to move for an internship that will only last through the summer.  I have a car, which means that I can commute to an internship, but additional expenses come with that (gas, insurance, repairs, etc).  If I were to get an offer for an internship that would require me to relocate, I could not afford to pay two rents, two sets of utilities, and the cost of moving unless the internship offers fairly substantial compensation.

I understand that many organizations cannot afford to pay for interns.  The economy is lean and many companies struggle to find ways to pay the staff they currently have.  For those companies, I think it’s fine to have unpaid intern positions, but the internships need to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the intern.  These internships should cater to the intern rather than to the company or organization. 

Employers also need to understand that the students who can afford to take unpaid intern positions are not going to come from some of the most diverse backgrounds that higher education has to offer. 

Low-income and first-generation students often don’t know what the potential benefits are of having an internship or are unable to take one due to other obligations outside of school.  Students who are academically strong, but must work in order to continue their education are also unlikely to be able to take an internship.

Many students that can afford to be interns will be business students or upper-middle class students who have grown up with a certain amount of financial privilege.  These students haven’t necessarily had it easy.  However, they have the luxury of having enough resources to afford to get that kind of work experience.  I n my admittedly limited experience, all of the people that I knew who did internships in college were white, upper-middle class, local (grew up near the school they attended), and had extremely supportive parents that were willing to help them offset the costs.  In two cases, their parents provided them with a car so they could get to and from their internships.

So where does that leave students like me?  What does this mean for the future of industry and diversity in the workplace?  Even though people have access to a degree, are we still creating a discrepancy between society’s “haves” and “have-nots”?  These questions should all be looked at and discussed at length by employers and higher education institutions alike.  We need to make sure that we are not only creating a system that minimizes inherent inequalities, but also valuing the experiences and perspectives that the diverse student population in this country brings to the workforce.

When Allergies Attack

Allergies are the bane of my existence.  I have year-round allergies, but each spring I am once more reminded just how much Mother Nature hates me.

I love flowers and finally seeing the sun make an appearance after months of overcast and rain. I enjoy going outside without needing to wear 18 layers of clothes and a scarf.  Spring is when people go out and walk their dogs and when I go out to look at all the dogs being walked (I don’t have a dog of my own).  However, I know that every new flower that blossoms is Mother Nature’s latest attempt at killing me.

On the up side, I am not alone.  My roommate experienced a ten-minute sneezing fit yesterday at work.  I have seen more people rubbing at their eyes over the past few days (and I don’t think that all of it can be attributed to sleep deprivation). Apparently updates from allergy sufferers in my city are also “trending” on Twitter.

You’d think with such advanced medical research and high-tech companies here, we would have done something about this by now.  I bet that, given how many nerds/geeks that live in the area, this city has a higher-than-average number of allergy sufferers per capita.  If economics has taught me anything, it’s that this should create demand for allergy treatments within the market.  Other than allergy shots and an insane amount of antihistamines, I haven’t heard of any magical medical mixes that will solve this problem.

During most of the year, my allergies are a minor annoyance.  My allergies are background noise to the rest of my various medical afflictions.  On one hand, I think that my allergies are beneficial during every time of the year other than spring.  I need to make sure to keep my room relatively dust-free and somewhat clean.  I can’t let food get moldy without having a particularly annoying respiratory reaction. 

I imagine that my allergies are like beefy white blood cells that attack anything and everything that comes into my system.  I picture my immune system looking like the cast from “300” only with grenades, laser vision, and ninja-like reflexes.  Whenever everyone else is out with a cold or the flu, I look around and think, “Huh. I didn’t even know that was going around.”  Thank you, Godzilla-like over reactive immune system. 

If I were to have a conversation with my immune system about this, I would ask, “So that cold that everyone got except for me last fall.  Did I never get infected or were you guys just super effective?” The leader of my immune military combatants would likely say, “What cold? Oh, that pesky thing? We dealt with any of those silly buggers that tried to come in.  It was nothing.  That dust mite, however, that was an epic battle, believe you me!”  I think that the commander has a really cheesy absentminded British accent.  And probably wears a monocle.  Yes, definitely a space cadet.  I bet they even drink the germ battle fighter equivalent of Earl Grey tea.

Maybe there will come a day that medicine and science can create a way for me to work with the armed forces commander of my immune system.  So if any of you reading this are in the medical field or need a really cool research project, you should get on this.  You’ll have a willing human test subject.

Wibbly wobbly time

For whatever reason, time works differently in grad school.  In high school, weekends were the best thing ever; you spent time with friends, hung out by the river, played video games, whatever. 

Things changed a little bit in college, mostly because there was no parental supervision to keep stupidity in check.  In college, you could go out any day of the week, you could skip class without any immediate adverse consequences, and you had the most freedom (with the least amount of responsibility) that you were ever going to have again.  Weekends and breaks took on a whole new level of importance because now you could go places and do things and, most importantly, you could do whatever you wanted to do and your parents never had to know.

When you start work and have to stick to a basic 8-5 schedule (or, in my case, you get to do 8-5 plus about 10 hours a week of extra events or travel), breaks no longer matter. Summer was just another season for me, spring break had little or no significance beyond all the parking spots around work opening up because there were no students around. However, my evenings were a newly discovered blessing.  I remember that the first week of work I was too tired to do much other than make dinner and then go to sleep.  After that first week, however, I found myself asking, “What do you do in the evening when there aren’t any assigned readings or other homework?”  It was like magic.

As a recent college graduate with a degree in social science, I almost inevitably found myself facing unemployment. This introduced an entirely new concept of time to me.  Evenings were no different than mornings.  Weekends and weekdays were identical in every respect.  Time meant nothing.  I am pretty sure that there were about two months of time that I didn’t actually know what day of the week it was or the date. 

It was like the strangest time limbo ever.  It wasn’t the same as a break from school.  Breaks from school have a distinct end date.  That means that you have to have some concept of day/date/time.  Unemployment was like wandering a desert or being stranded in the middle of the ocean: it didn’t matter what I did or in which direction I wandered because it was just going to be more of the same.

Throughout the next few years, I yo-yoed between employment and unemployment like the most ill-conceived financial diet in the history of poor dieting decisions.  To solve this, I decided that the best thing was, obviously, to go deeper into debt and start graduate school. Why break even when I can just keep myself in debt for another decade, right? How could this possibly go wrong?

Now that I’m in the last third of my first year, I am discovering that time functions differently in grad school in a way that I’ve never experienced before.  Unlike undergrad when I had a lot of flexibility in selecting classes, thus ensuring that I always had at least one class that was “fun,” my entire graduate program is already laid out for me. 

Taking a combination of economics, program evaluation, policy analysis, and statistics makes time move at a vastly slower pace inside the classroom, but makes all deadlines hit one week sooner than it says on the syllabus.  You think, “Okay, two weeks should be plenty of time to do this project.” Then, two days later, you realize that it’s due in 24 hours and you have barely started.  Where did the other 11 days go?  Nobody knows.  Those days just disappeared into the ether. 

If you look through your notes from class, you discover that in the last two weeks, you have been attending classes and have been doing readings, but somehow you don’t remember any time actually passing between the announcement of the project and the deadline for said project. 

I am really beginning to identify with Schrödinger’s poor cat.  I’m neither alive nor dead.  I’m a grad student: the ultimate level of time limbo.

Theoretically, I only have about a year left before days of the week, what month it is, or what date it is will once more function linearly.  Until then, well, I guess I’ll just exist.

Strays

I pick up strays like stereotypical high school jocks pick up cheerleaders.  This has been happening for years, but I have no idea why.  I never intend to pick up a new stray, it just happens. 

Once I was driving from my parents’ house on the east side of the state back here to the west side of the state. Normally I do the entire 5-ish hour drive straight through without stopping, but this time I actually had to pull over at a rest stop to go to the bathroom.  Knew I shouldn’t have had that extra hot chocolate. 

As I emerged from the surprisingly not-stinky restroom, I heard a mewling coming from a box near the door.  I discovered that some jerk had left two tiny kittens in that box with no food or water and one dirty towel.  I waited around for about 20 minutes, but no one else came to the rest stop.  Not wanting to just leave them, I packed them into my car and dealt with 2 crying kittens for the next three and a half hours. 

I eventually learned that River and Zoe were only about 6 weeks old, a full two weeks too young to be away from their mother.  They were fostered out to a volunteer at the humane society and were eventually adopted.

Also, my ability for find strays is not limited to animals. 

Every time I take the ferry, I find a stray.  The first time this happened, I met Mary.  Mary was a very nice old lady from Georgia (although she pronounced it with a distinct drawl rather than my rather clipped Yankee accent).   During this hour-long ferry ride, I got to hear about her whole family.  I’m not kidding. She started with when her family came through Ellis Island and didn’t stop until I learned about Uncle Lloyd and Cousin Greta and her dear grandmother’s jewelry collection.

Ferry, take two: I was working on some origami cranes that I was planning on donating to a veteran’s hospital.  This young girl, I would guess she was in middle school, kept trying to surreptitiously look at what I was doing over the back of her chair.  Since she seemed to be so interested in what I was doing, I began a new string of cranes and gave them to her.  As she grinned shyly at me, her grandmother told me that I had made both of their days.  They had missed the last ferry because the grandmother’s chemo had gone a little longer than usual.  They had just received news that the cancer had spread to two different parts of the body and the prognosis was not good.  The grandmother told me that this was the best thing to happen to them in a long time and that this was the first time she had seen her granddaughter smile in about a month.  Needless to say, I made the grandmother a string of cranes, too.

This brings me to today.  I caught the bus so that I could run some errands between classes.  As I was getting off the bus, an older man asked if I would help him cross the street.  He walked with both a cane and a guide stick for blind people.  As he walked with me across the street, he began telling me all about his life.  His name is Roy and he served in Vietnam.  When he got back to the US, he got hit by a car and had a double compound fracture in his left leg, but after the doctor put two rods in it and used 32 stitches, he was fine.  In fact, he was up and walking on it in a matter of weeks.  Oh, and, by the way, I have a very youthful voice.  Roy is 70, although people tell him he doesn’t look a day over 60, so everyone has a youthful voice to his ears.  Was I going to the grocery store? No? Well, he was going to the Apple Store because his family got him a special retina computer that can enlarge and highlight text to the point where he can read it, so he’s going to take a class at the Apple Store.

I learned all of this in the less than ten minutes I was walking him to the store (hey, I wasn’t about to let a 70-year-old blind man wander around trying to find the dang store when it only took me a few extra minutes to make sure he got there safely.  I’m a terrible person, but not THAT terrible).

So there you have it.  My strays.  Not all of them, mind you, but some of the standouts.  I swear I live the strangest life.

I love being single on Valentine's Day!

I effing love Valentine’s Day.  I’m not even joking.  It’s my favorite holiday when I’m single. 

When I’m in a relationship, I could go either way on V-Day.  The traditional dinner, flowers, movie, date, or whatever is fine, but I don’t feel that there needs to be a special holiday created just so that you can get a special date.  However, I do like doing things for my significant other on that day.  I think it’s nice to treat people to something special, but I also don’t limit myself to surprising my S.O. only on Valentine’s Day. 

I’m one of those people who likes to use gifts, usually small ones, to let people know that I’m thinking of them.  I used to buy one of my former boyfriends athletic shirts every once in awhile because he was constantly getting overheated in the summer and wearing the lightweight fabric made him feel a little less like he was dying.  It really didn’t matter the occasion.  I bought them if I saw they were on sale or if I went to Goodwill and happened to find one in his size.  I like to think that he appreciated the gesture and I’ve seen him wearing some of the shirts after we broke up (yes, we are still friends).

Back to Valentine’s Day.  I love being single on Valentine’s Day.  Love, love, love, LOVE being single.  It’s the one day of the year where a single person has absolutely zero social obligations.  Think about it: since you’re single, no one expects anything of you.  You could be happy or sad.  You are allowed to go out and party like it’s 1999 or sit at home in your pj’s watching bad romance movies and eating an entire gallon of ice cream.  No one cares what you are doing.  All the folks that are coupled up get so caught up in the whole holiday that they rarely think about their single friends beyond, “Oh, they probably won’t be doing anything special for Valentine’s Day.”

How many other times during the year can you honestly say that you can do whatever you want (within reason) and no one will think that you’re acting inappropriately?  How about your birthday?  Correct answer: Nope.  You are expected to do SOMETHING to celebrate, even if it’s intentionally sitting at home and doing nothing.  You’re doing nothing for your birthday. Not because you just don’t feel like doing anything because this nothing is different. This is birthday nothing. (Now say that last sentence to yourself as if you’re yelling, “This is Sparta!”  It makes the entire thing more epic.) Also, on your birthday, you are expected to play nice with others.  Oh, sure, you don’t have to invite people you don’t like to your celebration, whatever that ends up being, but say a relative sends you a terrible birthday gift.  What then?  You got it: you still smile and thank them while simultaneously trying to figure out how soon you can chuck it in the nearest garbage receptacle.  See? Social obligation.

How about other holidays?  I sincerely hope that I don’t need to elaborate the kinds of social obligations that come with Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Passover, Easter, Halloween, New Year’s, MLK Day, 4^th of July, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Mother’s/Father’s Day, et cetera.  Pretty much every holiday comes with certain norms and expectations.

That is why I feel that every single person should view Valentine’s Day as a special gift that only comes along once a year, courtesy of Hallmark, Hershey’s chocolates, and American consumerism. 

As a single person, you are given a “get out of jail free” card that allows you to behave as well or badly as you want without significant consequences.  If you want to take the “oh, woe is me” route, you can quietly implode while watching trashy movies and eating ice cream until you’re sick. If that happens, everyone will just think, “Aw, that’s too bad. They were so upset about not having someone special (unlike me because I am in a happy relationship) that they had a minor meltdown. Tsk tsk.” 

If you go a different direction and decide to go out and party like the world is ending, that is also an accepted way of coping with the dreadful shame of single-ness (single-dom?  Single-hood?).  You party, maybe make some poor choices, and almost always regret it the next day (don’t lie, you do too almost always regret it).  What do people think of that kind of self-destructive behavior? “It’s so sad that they did that, but who can blame them?  They weren’t thinking straight. It’s too bad that they don’t have someone in their life like me and my wonderful hubby-wubby muffy-face.  If they had someone, maybe they wouldn’t make such poor choices.“

No matter how you approach this as a single person, you come out ahead:

1. You save money (potentially)
2.  You get to be totally selfish and do whatever you want without having to consider other people
3. Like your married friends, you can look forward to eventually sharing your life with that special someone, but until then, you get to be as juvenile as you want to be
4. If you are still set on wanting to invest in the trappings of this holiday, you can buy flowers for yourself (and they will always be the flowers that you want) and a treat like chocolate (and all of the chocolates will be the ones that you like)
5. There are no expectations to live up to

Actually, #5 is an important one.  Think about those poor saps stuck on a date with a new relationship on Valentine’s Day.  How on earth do you celebrate?  On one hand, you could go all-out and hire a pilot to take you on a private jet to some fancy-pants restaurant and watch the sunset as you share dessert and then go out and make love under the stars.  Of course, would such a grand gesture set the tone for the rest of the relationship?  Realistically, for most people V-Day is less important than Anniversaries, birthdays, etc.  Will you now have to do something outrageous and expensive every time there’s a holiday?  How are you going to top something like that?

Then there are those folks who run in the opposite direction: they do nothing for Valentine’s Day or treat it just like any other day.  How might that set the tone for the future of this relationship?  In particular, how might that throw a wrench into things if one person wants something special while the other one wants to pretend that the holiday doesn't exist?  Ideally, it wouldn’t affect the long-term viability of the relationship in any meaningful way, but think about the kinds of social pressures that couples face on this holiday.  If you were to tell someone that you have been dating someone for two months and you aren’t planning anything special for Valentine’s Day, you can be sure that they will judge you, one way or the other.

Now picture someone asking you if you have plans for Valentine’s Day when you’re single.  You say you’re single and nine out of ten times what is their answer? I’m not sure about you, but most of the time when I tell people that I’m going to be single on Valentine’s Day, they express sympathy and then quickly drop the subject.  However, when I had a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, I was always expected to have plans.  If nothing else, I knew that I would be expected to be with him that evening rather than doing anything else or spending time with other people.