Foreign markets - Import/Export from New Bedford
Foreign markets - Import/Export from New Bedford
Another sweltering day that could be spent at the beach or the pool has dawned, but out there on the job, the summer employees are hearing their bosses say: "And when you get a sec, could you clean up after my dog?"
And the employees are replying: "You betcha, sir! And thanks!"
Who are these employees? Here's a hint: They're suspiciously young and they're shocked that the office computers don't have Windows '95. When the copier flashes "toner low," they're more likely to distinguish themselves from regular workers by stampeding out of their cubicles to respond.
They're the summer interns, a segment of the labor force that, in a generation, has grown to encompass roughly a third of college students and a growing number of kids in high school and junior high. From law firms to movie studios, interns have become a seasonal fixture -- a legion of often eager and usually cheap trainees who flood the nation's workplaces seeking a career toehold.
What they get is that and more -- a three-month chance to educate and prove themselves, yes, but also a pass-fail course in Reality 101.
"It's rougher than you think," said Jeff Marquez, 22, a University of California, Los Angeles, business major. "It's a big realization when that time of just-get-good-grades comes to an end and it's time to make a living."
Once the purview of hustling pre-professionals and connected rich kids, the internship -- a temporary stint of on-the-job training -- has become a sometimes exciting, sometimes sobering, often necessary rite of passage.
Despite corporate restructurings that have shrunk some programs (openings for summer law associates, for instance, are scarcer), campus placement officials say internships have grown exponentially, in part because of a sense among students that a college degree is no longer enough to guarantee a good job.
L. Patrick Scheetz, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, said that despite three years of mild growth, the job market for recent graduates has been "unfriendly, competitive and maybe even a fraction hostile" since 1988. That has prompted students to scour the landscape for ways to improve their resumes.
Internships, for many, have fit the bill, despite the possibility that the work will be menial and the pay will be low. Even the worst offer a chance to network, sample a career and, in some cases, get college credit or extra cash. National surveys of college placement offices and large employers have found that 30 percent of college graduates enter the job market with one or more internships on their resumes, and about half of new hires have internship experience.
From the employers' standpoint, interns -- especially college interns -- provide a cheap yet educated labor pool. In years past, recruiters said, internship programs were viewed with skepticism as expensive gambles that, at worst, cut into productivity by saddling regular employees with novices and kids.
But time and experience have weakened that prejudice. "More and more employers are telling us they want work experience, and that comes from internships," said Joyce Haraughty, marketing manager for UCLA's career center.
One recent survey, done by the authors of the Internship Bible, a directory published by the Princeton Review, found that the cost of hiring a former intern was roughly a third the cost of recruiting and training a new employee.
Companies also turn to internship programs to diversify their work force or beef up service during a summer peak in demand.
So popular is the internship as an entree into the working world, in fact, that federally funded summer jobs programs have adopted its framework and lexicon. Dianne Russell, career center manager for the Foothill Private Industry Council in Pasadena, Calif., said that this year she expects to place more than 1,000 low-income students ages 14 to 24 in "internships" that augment the council's standard summer jobs with career counseling classes.
The intern experience does have its downsides. For one thing, there's usually little or no pay. As the bottom-feeders on the corporate food chain, interns are often among the first to be cut when a company re-engineers. And unless their bosses are conscientious about educating them, interns are ripe for exploitation -- or almost worse, neglect.
Cartoonist Scott Adams, who lampoons corporate culture in his "Dilbert" comic strip, says he gets "an unusually high percentage" of his e-mail from summer interns, who typically have signed onto the Internet from their office computers on company time because they don't have enough to do.
Mr. Adams says their stories have inspired his cartoon depiction of interns as hapless victims of "spank-the-intern" office fund-raisers who are punished for good ideas by being flung into the cosmos on an office "intern-a-pult."
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