"Unless you are born rich, don't show up": Unpaid Interns

[love_pirate]

Career series continues!  This one is about unpaid internships, and is inspired by this New York Times article, which I learned about from Katie.  Usually, the comments to news articles are pretty inane, so I was surprised to find myself losing track of time, reading a large number of the comments.  A lot of them were really interesting and

Comments

[bigger_tigers]

Wow. I thought I was the only one who felt this way, obviously I haven't been doing my research.

One of the reasons why I dropped out of college was because I saw it was all a facade. It was exactly like high school. I was told college was gonna be a lot of essay writing and test taking, I got there and had to do a shit ton of homework that I didn't have time for because I was working two jobs (and I still had to ask my parents for help with tuition [I also had a scholarship]). I'm glad I didn't pull out any student loans.

Students in college are coddled and corralled all the way into their cap and gown if they can pay the tuition. What happened to education based on merit? Oh, excuse me, I forgot that this is a capitalist nation, and money is the password into any club/school/job/etc. Nothing "happened" to education based on merit, it's just never existed.

[love_pirate]

Yeah, college is too expensive in this country. It's a big problem, and I'm not sure what, if anything, is happening to ease it. I think schools really vary though on how much is expected of the students once they're there. Depends on the major, too. But I found that once I got out of college, I could have majored in candy corn and it wouldn't have made much difference. Unless you went to the Ivy League, it seems to not matter if your program was easy or challenging.

I'm just thinking aloud here, but one issue seems to be that schools feel this huge pressure to compete amongst themselves, and then pass on the cost of doing that. At my friend's school, they raised tuition so that their football team could get into a "higher" league. Huh?!? Maybe school rankings are too important...

[bigger_tigers]

Wow, really? That's just retarded