Unpaid Internship Report

In the summer of 2015, Clare Varellas, a sophomore at Northwestern University, interned for a small publication. She worked three days a week without any compensation—and said she would do it again.

“It’s about the experience rather than the money,” Varellas said. “You get something to build off of. Eventually, you’ll get paid.”

Although unpaid internships are declining among college students, they are still heavily utilized in certain fields. By nature, they are drastically different experiences than paid internships. They are meant to be a learning experience, but can financially burden students.

Workplace flexibility is a main difference between paid and unpaid internships. Silas Wuerth, 18, is an unpaid intern for Representative Jim Cooper

“I’ve gotten to learn more about fiscal issues, economics and statistics. With a paid internship, that would be very different.”

In 2015, Northwestern junior Carson Brown was an unpaid summer intern at RVAmag.com, a small publication in Richmond, Virginia. Brown worked in the office two to three times a week and spent her free time interviewing and writing stories on topics ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to local artists, she said.

Unpaid internships where students are able to work on projects help them gain experience, said Carrie McAteer, director of DePaul University’s University Internship Program.

Varellas worked as an unpaid editorial intern for Zozi, a retail, travel and lifestyle startup in San Francisco, California, working on their brand’s new journal. Her editor told her she wanted the internship to be a learning and networking opportunity, especially because it was unpaid, she said.

“I think that if I’d worked in an older journal or a more structured one, it would have been less of a learning experience and more of a utilitarian ‘can you get this stuff done for us?’ thing,” Varellas

Brown supports reducing the number of unpaid internships, she said.

“They’re classist,” she said. “It’s frustrating, especially if you’re a student who is a low income student.”

Tushar Chandra, a Northwestern sophomore who interned full time for pay in the summer of 2015, said he would not have taken his position and sublet in Evanston without compensation.

“Technically, unpaid internships should only be allowed if the person is providing no business value to the organization,” Chandra said. “I think that they’re exploited a lot. Organizations will take on unpaid interns and give them actual work.”

Students who are able to take unpaid positions should do so despite their downsides, said Thy Nguyen, Director of Career Services at the University of Illinois at Chicago. However, ideally students would be paid, he said.

According to Intern Bridge’s 2012 report, 64.1 percent of students need to work second jobs to support themselves while working an unpaid internship. Understanding this, DePaul’s career center refuses to advertise full time unpaid internships to students, McAteer