Summers growing up were always so easy. School is out! Time to spend all of those long, hot summer days riding bikes around the neighborhood, going to the pool, and picking which summer camp would be the most fun. Wouldn't it be so nice to go back and have that feeling of your biggest concern being which snack you'd buy at the pool snack bar? Gosh, I miss it.
Towards the end of high school, summers became more about finding little summer jobs to save up money for college and for all of those summer activities. One of my last summers of high school I got a job doing manual labor at a nearby barn and made a pretty decent chunk of money, although I'd come home covered in dirt and smelling like horse manure with calluses the size of quarters on my hands. But it was fun at the time to be making my own money (and getting pretty fit while doing it.)
And then you go off to college and realize, Damn life is expensive when you're not living with your parents. Especially going to school in a city like Miami, where a single drink at a bar will put you out $20, it really became clear I needed to make more of an income.
You come home from college, ready to reunite with friends and live comfortably at home, and suddenly it's like, Crap, I need to find a job. And finding a job for the summer is not as easy as everyone makes it out to be. Why is it that nearly every single job wants to tell you they "need someone more long term"? Like, we get it, your business runs year-round, but is there no extra demand during the summer months?
I swear I send out no less than two dozen applications every single summer and I either don't get a response or I get an immediate rejection because they're not looking for someone who will just be here for the summer. It seems IMPOSSIBLE to find anything and I struggle with the same damn routine every single year.
Don't even get me started on UNPAID INTERNSHIPS. Literally how are those even legal??? They expect college students to work full-time hours fo no compensation? It's not even possible to reasonably afford to do that for most students, and the ones who have enough financial stability to take an unpaid internship are the same people who don't need all of the career connections it provides. Even those internships that provide credit for school shouldn't be allowed.
Companies get FREE LABOR while promising students future jobs or "valuable work experience" and only benefit the already-wealthy families. Many careers post-grad won't even look at your application unless you've had experience in one of these internships and it's not fair at all. Students, especially those with loans and scholarships, should be getting paid fair wages since they're the ones who will be graduating with loads of student loan debt.
It also seems wildly unfair that almost all of the internship opportunities for health-related fields are unpaid. Business and finance majors have tons of opportunities to get high-paying internships, while those looking to gain real experience in healthcare fields or the sciences have to shadow for no pay, or assist in research for bare-minimum compensation. How is that fair? How is it fair for ANYONE to work for no pay? This isn't volunteer work; this is real-world job experience that students do for FREE. It just doesn't make sense.
I took an unpaid internship last summer in New York, mostly because I was desperate to be in the city, and while I did learn a lot of really applicable skills, I was hemorrhaging money all summer just to say I had an internship in the Big Apple. I did really love the company, but the whole time I felt like some sort of pawn being used to do busy-work and the organization tasks no one else wanted to do. All of that would have been fine if I had been paid for my time.
Now I'm home for yet another summer while figuring out future plans and I hit the same old hiring issue. I was home for a month before finding somewhere that would hire me, and even then it was like, Okay well now I have one less month I'm able to work. I really love my current job; I'm walking dogs in town and it's one of the least stressful jobs I've ever had. I mean, what's better than playing with cute pups all day, staying in shape by walking 5+ miles a day, and getting paid for it???
I just wish that for future students, there were more job opportunities and no more unpaid internships. It's hard enough having to face the fact that you'll be leaving college with possible thousands of dollars in debt. Summer is no longer a three-month-long vacation, but rather a time to scramble to make any sort of income in order to offset the costs of being a student. And to those students who don't have to work all summer and spend months traveling: can you bring me with you?
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