Your job, your future: Keeping your fingers crossed
There’s a famous scene in 1967’s The Graduate in which Mr. McGuire tells an unconvinced, aimless Benjamin Braddock at his college graduation party that “there’s a bright future in plastics.” In 2006, however, that portrayal of the archetypically directionless young adult might not resonate with the average Hoya—he’d wonder why Benjamin hadn’t seized upon the idea of that future in plastics years earlier and parlayed his father’s connections into several summer internships, then a plush job straight out of school with Mr. McGuire’s own firm.
If you stopped a random sample of Georgetown students in Red Square and asked them about their employment plans for the summer, chances are that very few would respond by excitedly telling you about their full-time waitressing gig at Applebee’s or nannying job for the next-door-neighbors. Instead, you’d be peppered with a mélange of decidedly impressive sounding employers—think tanks, senators, Wall Street firms, NGOs, major publishing houses. Not only have these internships replaced the traditional summer job, they have become de rigeur for many Georgetown students during the academic year as well.
According to the interim executive director of the MBNA Career Center, Mike Schaub, approximately 90 percent of the students who come through the Career Center have at least one internship in their four years at Georgetown. This percentage is well above most other schools—at Princeton, for example, that statistic is about 60 percent of students, according to the Princeton Office of Career Services. Georgetown’s location in Washington D.C. seems to be an obvious explanation for this, but many also point to a certain “pre-professional” culture at Georgetown that may help foster it.
Especially in competitive fields, an internship has become almost a de facto requirement for scoring a full-time job. A 2005 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that 61.9 percent of class of 2004 hires had internship experience
Yet the primacy placed upon undergraduate internships is a relatively new phenomenon. In 1980, just one out of every 36 undergraduates reported having completed one. Schaub, who has been at the Career Center since 2000, said that the change he has witnessed has been remarkable.
“Students are just more savvy than when I graduated in 1990—internships were just not that big of a deal,” he said. “There’s been a change in culture where employers expect it. Now it’s not that unusual to have freshmen looking for internships.”
Those hyper-driven freshmen may be onto something. A 2004 study of finance, marketing, accounting and management majors published in Education and Training revealed that 58 percent of those who completed an internship had secured a job by graduation, while just 17 percent of students who had not done an internship had job offers. The advantages of having an internship seem abundantly clear.
For some students, however, the sacrifices of time and money preclude them from taking an internship; and even for some who do have one, it’s not always all wine and roses. Although many people say that an internship is an opportunity to explore whether a particular field is a “good fit,” the Education and Training study found that the students who had completed an internship were less confident about the fit of their jobs than those who had not, meaning that perhaps they viewed the internships as more of a tool for getting a job than for figuring what career path to take.
However, internships are certainly an important diagnostic tool for the companies who sponsor them—the NACE survey revealed that a majority of employers considered recruiting entry-level talent to be the primary focus of their internship program. This, of course, often turns out to be mutually advantageous; 35.6 percent of the interns in the NACE survey were able to turn their internships into full-time offers.
At The Washington Post, for example, the only students who are hired straight out of college are those who have completed an internship at The Post, usually a couple of reporters each year. There are at least 500 applications annually for just 20 paying internship spots at the paper, and in order to be even considered, applicants must have had at least one prior internship at a daily professional paper.
“Writing for a college newspaper just isn’t the same. You need that professional experience,” Katherine Tolbert, director of recruiting and hiring, said. “Having a variety of jobs is a good thing in terms of broader experience in the world, I suppose, which will ultimately make you a better journalist. But it wouldn’t help you in terms of being hired at The Post—we’re looking at clips, internships and past related experience in the field.”
Feeder set-ups like this one often privilege students who decide their career goals early and follow a proscribed, internship-laden path to the entry-level job of their choice.
According to Patrick Metz (COL ‘04), internships are an important component to getting a job even at many nonprofit organizations. Metz is the co-chair of the internship committee for Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning rights advocacy organization. He said that of the 100-125 current employees, about half had been interns there at some point before being hired. However, unlike at a private sector internship program designed to be a feeder into the corporation, entry-level job openings are fairly rare and completing an internship there doesn’t automatically lead to a full-time hire.
“We don’t get a whole lot of random entry level hires, since we have such a large pool of young people who we already know through internships,” he said. “There are only a certain number of jobs, and there’s more of a personal connection with who you know in the nonprofit sector. Those connections give you an important foot in the door.”
A field like investment banking is one where summer internships famously turn into full-time, lucrative offers, with students jockeying to get on the “right track” as early as freshman year. However, Avik Pramanik (MSB ‘06) ended up with a job offer at Goldman Sachs despite missing out on the first two years of that traditional path. He came to Georgetown as a junior transfer student from Rutgers, in part because of the school’s strong record of placing people in Wall Street positions, but took a less conventional job offer last summer.
Lacking classroom experience in finance, he wasn’t able to land a job at a “bulge-bracket” firm—one of the top 8-10 big Wall Street names. Instead, through connections, he took an internship at a “boutique” firm, a primarily German company with about 50 employees.
“The workload was big for an intern, and I had a lot of responsibilities—I didn’t get to party as much as a lot of people do,” he said. “I worked my butt off, but I think that came across in interviews for full-time jobs and really helped me.”
Although this path certainly worked for him, Pramanik said that the Career Center would initially push you towards the bulge-bracket firms, which give interns the advantage of size, connections, formalized training and “brand-equity”—big names that are recognized way beyond the confines of Wall Street.
Schaub disagrees, however, pointing out the individuated nature of career counseling at Georgetown.
“I have never heard of a staff member ‘pushing’ a student toward any particular company,” he wrote in an e-mail. “When I work with students, I take into account the student’s unique career goals when helping him or her decide on companies. In fact, we make it a point not to ‘push’ any companies because students’ needs are unique.”
Fifty-seven percent of the internships posted on the Hoya Career Connection network are paid, but the pay scale varies widely. A quick glance reveals that politically conservative organizations compensate their interns far better than their liberal counterparts do. Internships at the ACLU and Brookings Institition are all unpaid, while organizations like the Heritage Foundation sponsor a number of paid internships at conservative think tanks. With a few notable exceptions, many of the most coveted internships in D.C.—on the Hill, at the Smithsonian—are unpaid. Some fields, like investment banking or consulting, traditionally pay handsomely, while a nongovernmental organization or publishing house might offer only a small, symbolic stipend. At the HRC, for instance, interns receive either a living expenses stipend or academic credit, which is a bit anomalous in the NGO sector.
“The inability to offer compensation for internships does skew applicant pools towards students who can afford to spend their summers or extra hours during a semester working a job that doesn’t allow them to support themselves or save money for school,” Metz said. “Since HRC does offer a stipend, the effect is somewhat lessened, though certainly not eliminated. Most of our interns have second jobs, grants, fellowships, savings or help from their family.”
Fifty-five percent of Georgetown students receive some sort of financial aid, but Schaub said that strained finances do not necessarily have to be an impediment in the internship hunt.
“Some students have more flexibility than others who come in and say that they absolutely need a paid internship, but everyone will be able to find one if you are conscientious,” he claims. “Especially in the D.C. area, you will have a competitive advantage over friends at other schools.”
Dean Bernie Cook (COL ‘90), said that this built-in advantage has always been there, but what is different in today’s internship culture is the proliferation of options for students.
“What’s changed is the explosion of think tanks and NGOs over the last 20 years. Instead of just working with big-names on the Hill, students have the opportunity to work with small policy advocacy groups,” he said.
Not everyone agrees with Schaub and Cook, though. Mary Kennedy (SFS ‘05), who majored in international politics-security studies, said she was unable to find a paying internship in her field and had to put in as many hours as possible at her part-time job.
“Before my senior year, I wasn’t too worried about it,” she said. ” Although it seemed like everyone had an internship, I figured that most people didn’t really do anything at their internships beyond making copies and faxes that would give them too much of an edge over me.”
When she began to apply for federal government, security and terrorism-related jobs, however, she found that although interviewers gave lip-service to the work ethic she displayed by working throughout school, they always ended up telling her she needed more on-the-job experience.
“I have had more than one person tell me this; one begged me to go get ‘anything’ in a certain field on my resume, call him in six months, and he could hire me,” she recalled in an e-mail. “So although they all scramble to reassure me that there is ‘nothing wrong’ with working through college and having no internship, it just doesn’t get me the job. It seems to be less of the actual experience you get at the internship, and more of the line on the resume, so that they can justify picking you over someone else.”
In an informal survey published in a 2004 USA Today article, a reporter found that 60 percent of unpaid interns had parents who earned over $100,000 per year, but that income bracket comprised just 20 percent of the broader pool of college students.
In a hiring climate that increasingly seems to reward internships, Georgetown students seem uniquely well-positioned to succeed, but some wonder whether that success is coming at the cost of a move away from true meritocracy, toward a premature careerism that interferes with the goals of a Georgetown education.
Liz O’Callahan (COL ‘06) said that she has never been able to afford taking an unpaid internship—she has a work-study job as a Yates lifeguard, which allows her to contribute to her tuition, utilities and living expenses. She acknowledged that she could pile an internship on top of that commitment and her involvement in activities like the Living Wage Coalition and Children’s Theater, but she said that she prefers not to have all of her time booked.
“I’ve looked for internships that are going to pay, but they don’t have those for cultural things, or nonprofits, or basically anything I want to help out with—those organizations are usually so broke anyway,” O’Callahan said. “As an Anthropology major, it would have been great to intern at a museum, but the odds of me getting paid were slim to none.”
Although O’Callahan said she thinks that certain students take it for granted that they can rely on their parents for financial support while they take an internship, she said she also believes that people often automatically project a certain assumption of wealth onto Georgetown students that isn’t necessarily there. She added that many students she knows work in order to finance their own internships.
Nora O’Brien (COL ‘06), a fellow Yates lifeguard, is one such student. A Spanish major, she is currently doing her first unpaid internship, at a private intelligence service. She took the job because it involved far more than faxing and making copies, allowing her to make extensive use of her writing talent and Spanish language skills. Working is a point of pride for O’Brien; she said she never felt it was fair to ask her parents to support her while she, essentially, volunteered. Still, she said she believes that her part-time job won’t be as valuable to her in the future.
“I don’t list Yates at all on my resume. Employers do say that’s important to show that you can juggle commitments, but I have so many other things on my resume,” she said.
This juggling act has resulted in a heavy scheduling overload for O’Brien, who said that when she first began the internship last fall, she had to drop shifts at Yates and take four classes instead of five to cope with the increased demands on her time. She is literally forced to schedule her day in strict half-hour blocks in her planner. Although she said she doesn’t necessarily have well-defined career goals, O’Brien acknowledged that she felt a certain careerist pressure that impelled her to apply for the job.
Getting a sense of the broader world beyond Georgetown was one of this things O’Brien said she liked best about her work. Following graduation, O’Brien will teach in a Spanish preschool, and she credits some of the experience she has gained from the internship with helping her in the job search and offering her a sense of direction.
“One of the things this has given me is a portfolio of writing samples. In the past, I’ve taken paid internships with less substantive, more mundane work. In a way, I regret that,” she said. “I actually took a year off and interned, partly because I hate the whole ‘I know exactly what I’m doing wth my life thing’ that’s so prevalent at Georgetown. Seeing that there’s something beyond grades in the world has been great. “
Cook also said that he sometimes witnesses this pre-professional attitude in his capacity as a dean, but that internships can be an enriching part of the college experience—if they are truly integrated with the student’s academic interests.
“If internships are carefully chosen, they can really augment the academic experience. The downside comes when students sometimes get over-invested in internships to the detriment of grades,” Cook said. “College policy requires students not work more than 20 hours a week, but that often gets ignored in order to do things that aren’t really that substantive—grunt work jobs that sound impressive.”
Cook also said that another recent development that might contribute to a “pre-professional” culture is the increased number of students who come in with Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate credits that allow them to skip introductory courses.
“In some ways that sort of robs them of taking full advantage of the liberal arts requirement that gets them thinking about the intersection of various disciplines,” he said. “Sometimes students jump quickly into a certain academic path because they’ve already decided on a career path.”
Schaub said that there are many more undecideds like O’Callahan and O’Brien than one might think, and that the Career Center is more than willing to accommodate those who don’t want to travel the standard path. He stressed that there are many ways to define what an internship is, and he said that any activity where professional, “generalizable” skills are used can be marketed as an internship, as long as you “talk it up” that way. He was careful to point out that internships are just one piece of a larger puzzle that includes grades, research and activities.
O’Callahan also said that she believes her campus activities will be crucial in her future plans, and she emphasized that she doesn’t consider internships as the be-all, end-all to finding a job.
“I’ve done a lot of labor activism on campus,” she said. “I know that I could go out and easily find a job with a union as an organizer.” She is still unsure of her plans for the summer, speaking with animation about applying to work with a professor on a performance art show for the summer, and generally just “taking things in steps.” Her attitude, however, has become increasingly rare.
“There’s a general trend in our society where so many more people are going to college that just a college degree won’t get you that entry-level job anymore,” Metz said. “An undergraduate degree is just a baseline, really, so people are doing graduate school and longer internships just to get those entry-level jobs. It’s not necessarily a good trend, but that’s the way it is.”
