Students opt to 'summer' in the office

They work 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours a week. When something goes right they rarely get credit, and when something goes wrong they always get stuck cleaning up the mess-or at least making the coffee for the people who do.

They are summer interns, and despite the long hours and low pay they continue to flock to job hubs around the country in search of resume padding, prestige or public policy credit.

The life may not be glamorous, but for students increasingly anxious about securing post-graduation jobs, internships are becoming the new summer school.

Some, like senior Scott Leslie, go into their internships hoping their summers will segue directly into post-graduation employment.

"A high percentage of kids who intern at any bank get a full-time offer," said Leslie, who worked as a summer analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston this summer and will start there full-time upon graduating in the spring.

At many investment banking and consulting firms, summer internship positions act as a primary screening process for full-time help. These positions are a way for firms to meet and woo top candidates one year earlier than the formal recruitment process, which typically occurs in the fall.

"In order to get in front of these people you have to have a high GPA," Leslie said.

For students who are certain they want to pursue a business position, this cut-and-dry analysis of potential interns can affect everything from course load to extracurricular activities. "When they're making choices about how they shape their academic experience, they're focused on how it looks from the outside, which I think is unfortunate." Nonetheless, Leslie said, he's grateful such careful planning has landed him a job. While everyone else is career hunting, Leslie said, "I have a lot of free time right now."

"It's a two-way learning process," she said. "I was able to use what I learned in the PPS core classes in my work, and then in my work I got a lot of experience in what it was like to actually work in a government agency."

Tan said many of the things she learned in her classes helped her in her summer job but that the policy problems she faced were much more complicated. "There's no textbook solution," she said.

Choosing a path

Even if students don't end up working in the exact same field as their internships, on-the-job experience can still help to shape the way they view the path they do end up taking, even if only by showing them what roads not to go down.

Junior Mike Dimarco interned at a non-profit organization that supports disarmament, and while he said he learned a lot about the issue and international relations in general, the biggest lesson he gleaned from his internship was the difficulty in making headway on a position regarding a controversial issue. "There's a lot of wasted energy," he said.

Dimarco said his primary internship responsibilities were updating databases and writing articles on arms holding throughout the world. He also said he spent a lot of days moving boxes. He has decided to push for change through the academic world and hopes to become a professor.

Other students balk at returning to the career fields they tried in the summer because they saw their superiors and colleagues struggling with difficult working conditions.

Even if the internship is great, the potential career path can be less appealing. Senior Charisse Williams, who interned with a National Public Radio-affiliated station, said she loved the work she got to do as an intern but would be hesitant to try for a career in radio after she graduates.

"Knowing how low of pay I was going to have and the volatility of the field is very hard," Williams said.

Navigating the intern life

Whether students continue in the field of their internships or not, the experience of finding and holding a job prior to graduation can be important training, said Elise Goldwasser, internship coordinator for the Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

"There's not going to be a class called 'How to Behave in the Office,'" she said.

The internship experience serves as a primer for many students in real-world responsibilities such as compiling a resume or searching for a job.

Senior Ashley Fitzgerald limited the locations she searched to spare her one of the many anxieties of the intern world: finding housing. "It wasn't like I had connections or anything, I just went online and winged it," said Fitzgerald, who ended up working in the office of Colorado's governor.

Fitzgerald e-mailed many offices until she found out which ones were hiring, then sent in her resume. Although she said she would not have gone to Denver just for the job, the benefit of getting to live at home and be near her family outweighed the disadvantage of limited job choices.

Senior Kaitlyn Bailey, who worked for a lobbying group in Washington D.C., said she leveraged her sorority connections to be able to stay at a sorority house at George Washington University.

"Had I not gone through GWU, I don't know what I would have done," she said.

Once situated in DC, however, Bailey said that she learned her way around the city fairly quickly. The best part of her internship, she said, was how supportive her co-workers were in helping her get oriented.

And the worst part? "Waking up at 6 a.m.," Bailey said.

The last word

Currently, public policy is the only department that requires students to have an internship before receiving their degrees.

Goldwasser cautioned, though, that it is easy to miss out on many of the benefits of an internship by searching for a prestigious employer without factoring in the quality of the work offered. Such internships might provide an attractive resume line, but a summer spent copying and faxing won't do much to help students learn about a field.

"I recommend that students get work experience with a dedicated mentor and a substantive project," Goldwasser said. "And if it's called an internship, that's fine."