Internships

After reading this article about the rise of unpaid internships, I couldn't help but feel like a victim of Corporate America. Ever since I decided to do business/marketing at the end of my 2nd year in college, I've been doing internships, mostly unpaid for the experience. My mentality back then was to catch up to my peers with business classes and experience since I had 2 years of Pre-Med under my belt. Anyways, my first internship with a non-traditional advertising agency was nonpaid. Most of the work was not challenging like posting links and comments on social networking sites to spread word of our advertisers. What better did I know when this was my first internship experience so I sucked it up. The best thing out of that internship was that I led a big project for the first time; advertising on social networking sites, mainly blogs, for Sony Pictures' Ghost Rider. Big fan of Marvel Comics but the movie flopped. If I could rewind, I would not have done this internship.

I rather not go through my entire resume in detail but I did a number of paid and nonpaid internship from a paid media planning agency to a full advertising agency in the summer (paid) to an international ad agency (stipend) to a nonpaid entertainment studio. All were great experiences that served as stepping stones to my next internship, but after the last one, I swore to myself never to work for free. My advice, if you need the experience for the FIRST time, do only ONE nonpaid internship that is worthwhile (not cleaning bathrooms or photocopying). Any more than one is not worth your time and it's simply isn't fair when for-profit conglomerates use free labor knowing that students are more than eager to work.

What I have learned is that recruiters look over one's resume looking for brand names and companies that he/she knows. They rarely read the bullets points for what you did for the following reasons 1) They probably don't understand the lingo that you are using when describing what you did 2) They spend 20 seconds at most. The eyes go from education to major to gpa. Then to work experience to company names to job title. Followed by extracurriculars to job title, then to skills and interests. Lastly to your name and the hand either puts you in the yes or no pile. That's all. A delightful tangent, anyways, brand names are important so do an unpaid internship with them only ONCE in your lifetime just for the experience. Other than that, forget about all these nonpaid internships.

The sum it all...here's a picture.



On a last note, this was really funny when I read it.

"How 'bout if I don't play in the playoffs until somebody tells me who did it," Martin said more than once.

This is in reference to Kenyon Martin getting mad on an April Fools' joke. So logically, he would threaten his playoff experience to find the culprit. What an idiot...