Summer dilemma: Get the experience - or the cash?

No lounging in the lifeguard's chair or busing restaurant tables. When Harvard sophomore Amy Heinzerling begins her summer job this month, she'll be at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, trying to protect natural resources - and working for no pay.

The unpaid internship will probably offer valuable experience for Ms. Heinzerling, an environmental studies major. But as the school year ends and students go out to develop real-world skills of building a career and making money during the summer, many face a perennial dilemma: Should they go for the cash offered by a traditional summer job or the career experience of a poorly paid or volunteer internship?

The answer depends on individual circumstances, experts say. But it's telling that more and more students are forgoing the money altogether to move ahead academically.

So should teens focus on internships? A lot hinges on where students are on the educational ladder. "When you are in high school up through your sophomore year in college, you want a diversity of jobs on your résumé," says Shawn Boyer, cofounder of SnagAJob.com, an online job site for part-time and hourly work. "Early on, internships aren't important. But when you are a junior or senior in college, you need experience in the field."

Of course, there's no strict division between a summer job and an internship. "What is a summer job for one student is an internship for another," says Steven Rothberg, president of the job-hunting website, CollegeRecruiter.com. "We encourage employers to refer to them as internships, because they will have more success hiring a better qualified candidate. Students are more apt to accept a position if it's called an internship than if it's called a summer job. It's just sexier."

Many students seem to agree.

"By the summer after the junior year, just about everyone is looking for an internship," says Dan Lynch, an economics major at Northwestern University with two internships under his belt. "I've found that doing internships helps build your résumé and helps you start off a conversation when you go into an interview for a full-time position."

Many career counselors concur, citing the skills, connections, and practical field knowledge gained through an internship. But good internships with prestigious firms often go to top students. Other internships may sound promising, only to turn into a stint of unpaid or poorly paid tasks that are of little value to the student.

Mr. Boyer warns that listing such experiences on a résumé, may result in embarrassment during a job interview. "You want to make sure that if you're putting it on - so it will look great in subsequent interviews - that you're actually able to tell them that you did something substantive while you worked at that company," he suggests. "If you made copies and ran errands, it may not look nearly as impressive as you'd initially hoped it would."

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