While in class this week, a guest speaker from a major company came to give a talk about his experiences in his field and advice for graduating students on how to land a first job.  At the end of his speech, he kindly added that his company would be looking for summer interns soon and preceded to give us all his personal email, should we be interested.

I thought this was a great opportunity and right away I was grateful that this stranger was willing to help all of us.  To my surprise, another student in the class raised her hand and said, rather rudely, that if the internship wasn’t paid, she wasn’t interested because, to graduating students, “the money matters.”  My mouth fell open.  I was shocked by this blunt, arrogant comment, made by someone with absolutely NO experience.  All that was needed was a simple “Thank you for your time,” not such a rude, unappreciative comment.

I left that class feeling rather annoyed.  She had opened her mouth and said something that made all of us, as a class, look bad.  And I began thinking about how many times I have heard students complain about the internship requirement to graduate and how they are usually unpaid.

Unpaid internships are not ideal.  Let’s be honest—who really wants to spend long hours putting in work for someone else and receive no monetary encouragement in return?  But what many students fail to realize is that these internships are taking a chance on us and instead of complaining about them, we should be grateful.

In the world of successful jobs, no one wants to hire someone without experience and no one can get experience without being hired.  That’s where internships come in.  They give you hands on experience and teach you things about your field that could never be learned in the classroom.  They spend their valuable time giving you the experience you need so that when you do go on a job interview, you have more to put on your resume then a list of clubs and athletics from college.  Instead of a paycheck, your internship is investing their time into securing you a successful future and I think it is wrong for so many of us students to take that for granted.

When you really put things in perspective, one semester of “free labor” isn’t going to kill you.  Money might be a little tight for a few months, but it is ONLY a few months.  It will be worth it when receive your first job opportunity because you had more experience than your competitors.  Everyone has to start somewhere and everyone has to put his or her time in.  So if you are anything like this rude girl that is in my class and you share the same negative outlook on unpaid internships, I suggest you change pretty quickly.  Complaining and having an attitude isn’t going to bring you success, but hard work will!