WSJ.com: "Internships can be a good way to gain experience in a field while job hunting or transitioning careers. Before signing up, however, you should know exactly what you'll get out of it and what your legal rights are.
The biggest legal issues are usually about pay. By law, internships can be unpaid only under certain circumstances. And paid interns should be aware of other workplace issues, such as overtime pay."
4 comments:
This article is not at all what I expected it to be about. I thought that it would have been more along the lines of what Paula Wagner spoke about when she visited, actually knowing the people youre interviewing for and how their company works. However, this article brings up the very important point of knowing your legal rights as well. I will be interviewing for an internship in a few weeks and the things that Wagner and this article bring up are things that I will consider and take to heart
I expected a lot of what Sonia did, but the rights and regulations the the author discusses are extremely important to people in our field and of our experience level. I myself am hoping for an internship, and this lets me know what I'm getting myself into with an unpaid job, and the sort of educational benefit I should be receiving from it.
The point about shadowing a professional not being a beneficial aspect for the company is an interesting one--why wouldn't an intern improving their skills be beneficial later down the road? If the intern improves in a way cohesive with the intent and philosophy of the company, then certainly the intern could be asked to work there in the future and thus benefit them.
I was just talking about this with my adviser the other day and I think its great that this article is on this blog so that those of us trying to find internships that may not be with large prestigious companies can be aware of what we're getting into. during the process of applying for several internships this summer i found some that made me unsure because of how vague the employer was about the specific terms of how many hours and how much I would be getting paid, my sister suggested some tips on how to avoid finding an internship that would disadvantage me, one of them is to ask for in writing the hours and compensation provided which this article mentions, she also suggested asking for a reference of a previous intern. Luckily, asking for both these things cleared up a lot of confusion and helped me see exactly what I was going to be getting out of the internship.
I didn't know a lot of this information before. Everything stated about the regulations of an unpaid internship makes a lot of sense, but they aren't things that I had specifically thought of before. I think that although an intern shouldn't provide immediate benefits to a company, they often do. Interns often do work that needs to get done, but that no one else wants to know. I feel like a lot of companies might be able to give interns work and classify it as "educational" whereas it might be busy work that they need done and have no one else to do it. On the other hand, that could be educational, to see what kind of work you really don't want to be doing.
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