Interns find more revved-up roles

Thousands of other employers liberally use college interns. Walt Disney recruits them, for instance. DePauw has sent interns to work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, at MSNBC, and on Wall Street. One student who worked with a communications company even helped plan the 2002 Super Bowl half-time program.

In Manhattan, nearly 100 students trek to RCA Records headquarters every year to tackle research on the Web, to work in finance, or to go nightclubbing to identify new talent. RCA's interns are unpaid, but spokeswoman Carrie Hand says each intern must receive credit for the experience from his or her school.

At the University of Chicago, about 100 students participate annually in its Metcalf Fellowship program. Many of these are paid positions, but many aren't, so the school raises funds to support students who choose to work at charities or other organizations that don't have the finances to pay for summer help.

There are a lot of unpaid internships in Washington, D.C., too, but that doesn't keep an estimated 50,000 young people from descending on the nation's capital every year to work for government agencies, lobbying and trade groups, and the like.

"The city runs [on] and relies on interns ... giving them a taste of the business field they've chosen," says Eugene Alpert, who heads the Washington Center for Internships and Academic Studies (www.wtc.edu), and the National Society for Experiential Education (www.nsee.org). His organizations arrange internships for 1,500 students annually.

Mr. Alpert says that during the past decade, internships have become part of students' culture and are the norm, not the exception. He sees them as an experience that students will remember for their entire lives, if for no other reason than the networking possibilities they can provide.

Not everyone finds internships useful. And some students find that once they begin an internship they've landed in a field where they really don't want to be. Ms. Gaulin says she once matched up a zoology student, destined for medical school, as an intern to a physician.

The student discovered that he didn't really want to become a medical doctor, but switched gears a bit to find a career in pharmaceutical sales.

From her perspective, Liz Hughes, an executive at job recruiter Robert Half International, says students get an immediate boost from an internship because they can list it on their résumé. And it shows a prospective employer that the student has real-life experience as well as an ability to juggle tasks, in this case studies with work.

"The more concrete work experience a college graduate has, the better," says Ms. Hughes.

And if an internship produces nothing else, she says, it will at least give a student a list of references that goes beyond professors.

The people often footing the bill for these out-of-school tryouts – parents – also seem accepting of them. According to Robert Bottoms, president of DePauw, test-driving a job underscores the ability of a liberal arts education to blossom into something practical.

"Parents are eager to see that a major in history might actually lead to a job," he says.

Page: 1 | 2