When you’re a university/college kid wanting to get a break in the world, you naturally try and get a internship for extra credit or just because you want the experience to give you that extra edge when you leave and head into the real world and actually start earning money. Internships or as they’re commonly known as “work experience” in non-Sillicon Valley circles are nothing more than legalised slave labour.
While the work experience might be of some value to a student, if you’re in the web/creative industry it all comes down to what you know and if you have a portfolio of some work to back it up, a prospective employer could care less if you interned at Nike for the summer, if you’re being hired as a programmer you better have more than “I worked on a shoe application at Nike, made coffee’s and typed up documentation” to bakc up your application.
Internships are free labour for companies, a student shows up hoping to learn something and ends up being bled dry. You have expectations placed upon you even though you’re not an employee and if you fuck up, there’s another 999 students eager to do some free work and once number #999 works out the company is merely after free labour, number #998 will take their place and so on.
While I’m sure some employers genuinely want to help students get a job and perhaps even end up hiring them, I’m sure the statistic (if there is one) of how many interns actually end up getting hired is actually quite low. If you can get a paid internship, take it because nobody likes working for free even if the employer is doing you a favour by giving you some experience.
