Every college student wants one thing above all else. In the springtime, our desire for it kicks into high gear. We dress differently, proposition people we’ve never met and even get down on our knees to get what we’re after.

Internships.

But why would anybody strive so hard to get a job that doesn’t pay? Internships are in fact completely unnecessary, and nothing more than an attempt by the ‘Right Wing Conspiracy’ or the ‘Left Wing Media’ or the ’80s band Wings or something to get free labor out of willing students.

According to Helen Murray, director of the Syracuse University Internship Program, the U.S. Fair Labor Act requires companies to pay you to work ‘unless you’re a trainee, and the way they qualify (students) as trainees is to have them work for credit.’

As if that wasn’t shifty enough, to get class credit from an internship, you have to pay for it: undergraduates pay $725 per credit, and graduates pay $870. If that’s not proof of an unholy alliance between SU and Big Business, I don’t know what is.

‘Some students take an internship for academic credit because they want to actually learn something for it,’ Murray said. Well here’s a newsflash for you: I work so I can get paid. I go to school because my alcoholism is cool here. When I want to learn something, I’ll watch Bill Nye.

The final kick in the pants is that to get your credits, you have to be graded by a professor. Which means ‘you can fail an internship the way you can fail anything else,’ Murray said. So after slaving away as some company’s bitch for three months, you can get concrete evidence that you are in fact a failure in life. And you still have to take Business Practices 323 to graduate.

Why anyone would choose an internship over a paying job is a complete mystery. Consider your summertime options: you can make big bucks life-guarding and checking out the neighborhood hotties at the pool every day, or you can get up at 6:30 every morning and go to a job where you do nothing but file paperwork and get coffee for a 48-year-old middle manager who hated you since the moment he laid eyes on you. Sure, most lifeguards get skin cancer, but they also get paychecks and the respect of … well, they get paid, dammit.

Undecided freshman Jonathan Luna said he would take an internship ‘for the experience, so I have something to look on when I get a real job.’ But ‘experience’ is just a buzzword employers will try to pull on you in an interview. Here’s how you should respond:

POTENTIAL BOSS: What experience do you have?

YOU, WITH A SMIRK: I sure have a lot of experience (italics) with your mom. (italics)

POTENTIAL BOSS: Damn homie, I got served! Take my corner office, you start today!

This method is guaranteed. If you can win the ensuing break-dance-off, you can probably get your own secretary.

Christine Lefebvre is a senior communications design major who has never had an internship, and doesn’t regret it. ‘I feel like my major prepared me enough,’ she said. Honestly, if four years of hard studying/drinking and $120,000 aren’t enough to guarantee anyone any job they want immediately after graduation, we should all drop out right now.

Besides, the only way anyone gets hired these days is through family connections. For instance, my dad’s uncle’s goddaughter’s friend’s former skydiving instructor is an astronaut. So this summer, while you sit around taking orders from that guy from ‘Office Space,’ I’ll be life-guarding on the ITALICSITALICS, bitches.

Published on April 25, 2005 at 12:00 pm