The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Ali Jackson | When Craig's List just doesn't cut it

At precisely midnight last Tuesday, a girl on the 18th floor of Rodin College House screamed so loudly, her suitemates thought she was being attacked.

Much to their relief (and subsequent anger), upon rushing into her room, they discovered her sitting in one piece at her laptop.

That girl was me and, no, I had not been taken out. I was simply signing up for an internship interview - I almost missed the deadline, okay? Cut me some slack.

Rest assured, I got my spot. But immediately after calming down, I realized that while getting an interview for this internship is awesome, there's one slight problem.

If I get the job, I have no idea where I'm going to live.

You see, the company I'd like to work for is based in New York City and I hail from San Diego, 3,000 miles away. Commuting isn't really an option.

I've started to look into my choices for summer housing, and the outlook is rather bleak.

The cheapest option seems to be living in the dorms at New York University, but even there, the cheapest rate is about $920 a month - and that's in a non-air-conditioned triple. If you've ever been to New York City in the summertime, you know what a problem that presents.

Patricia Rose, director of Penn's Career Services, said "expensive housing is one of the main reasons that students return home for the summer."

For those who live in areas that don't offer much in the way of jobs, returning home isn't possible - at least not if they want to get valuable internship experience that will lead to a job after graduation.

"One of the main problems is when students wish to work in an industry with historically nonpaying or low-paying internships," Rose said. "Places like Capitol Hill or the communications industry generally don't pay their interns."

College senior Corey Smith had an internship in Washington D.C. last summer.

"I really just lucked out with housing," she said. She spoke to friends she had in the area, stayed with one for a month, and subletted from an acquaintance for the remaining two months.

"Be willing to live with people you don't know in order to save money," she suggested. "I moved like five times that summer."

Wharton sophomore Janice Matasi will have the same issues when she gets an internship this summer.

"I need to make some money to help pay for studying abroad," she said, "but that might not work out because of high housing costs."

Matasi is considering living in Philadelphia and working for Housing and Conference Services - students who do this get free housing at the University.

"If I did that, I'd have to work part-time at my internship, though," she said. "I don't think they'd go for that."

Every year, Career Services conducts surveys of students who interned over the summer. According to their numbers, 40 percent of College students rented an apartment, 21 percent lived in a dorm, 32 percent lived at home, and 7 percent lived somewhere else entirely (your guess is as good as mine on that one).

On average, students renting an apartment paid $771 per month while those living in a dorm paid $1,103. This doesn't seem to fit but it can be explained by the number of students who sublet or rent from friends - the range of monthly rents for apartments goes from $250 to $4,000.

Compare this with the average salary: It's about $2,000 per month. That means that students living in the NYU dorms are spending nearly half of their salary on housing. That doesn't include food or anything else that the typical college student wants to do over the summer. But even if you live a barren life, you still have to eat.

I need to work during the summer so I can save money for the upcoming year when I won't have time for a job. Such ridiculous housing costs completely cancel this out.

I could make much more living at home and working as a waitress - with tips (which are mostly tax-free), I'd rack up quite the savings account.

But that leaves me without industry experience that recruiters look for come junior year.

I might be getting ahead of myself because I haven't even gotten the job yet, but just in case, I'm going to start working on my panhandling skills. They may be all that gets me through the summer.

Ali Jackson is a Wharton and College sophomore from Cardiff, Calif. Her e-mail address is jackson@dailypennsylvanian.com. A Little Person-Ali-ty appears on Mondays.

Comments (16)

welcome to the real world. you're having trouble finding affordable housing in manhattan?! do what the non-ivy league population does - suck it up and get a real job (paid).

Grad students at Penn, who have a pretty great deal relatively speaking, receive well under $2000 a year and regularly spend of it on housing and utilities.

Tips are not tax-free. They are supposed to be reported to the IRS. Though I agree that it is easy to evade that tax on tips by not reporting them, this is still tax evasion.

there are paid internships in industry that aren't in new york city. no one is going to sympathize with you as your realize that life can, in fact, be difficult outside the penn bubble.

I think Sharon Udasin ghostwrote this column. I cannot honestly believe someone actually thought this was fit to print.

If you want to work in The City over the summer, pull the silver spoon out of your mouth, and look for a cheaper apartment in *gasp* Brooklyn.

I don't think this article bemoans the high cost of housing in the big city--as some of you have suggested--so much as it highlights a very real dilemma facing less-than-wealthy college students: to intern or not to intern. Outside of a few industries, it's difficult to find a (competitively) paid internship that doesn't require an extensive application/interview process and stellar grades. Consequently, most of us are forced to choose between a garden-variety unpaid internship and a paid position unrelated to our major--or anything we'd consider doing post-graduation. The former might get our foot in the door at our dream company, while the latter will reduce living expenses and help subsidize our tuition. A better article might have investigated the importance of interning, in terms of landing a job and preparing one for the job they land.

You didn't really run any numbers when writing your article. Someone working full time works at least 160 hours per month (40/week), probably a bit more. Even a grossly underpaid intern makes $15/hour (unless in an unpaid internship). So, $15/hour * 160 hours = $2,400. That's more than most of the PhD students are living on here... and we have to live on that amount for about five years, not just a summer! (We don't work 40 hour weeks, which is why we get the low wages.) If you aren't liking your low-paid internship opportunities, you probably should consider a career in another field. There is a high correlation between poorly paying internships and poorly paying full-time jobs.

[QUOTE id="58b3babe-86a2-4c40-9133-4ba0c17c4b04"]You didn't really run any numbers when writing your article. Someone working full time works at least 160 hours per month (40/week), probably a bit more. Even a grossly underpaid intern makes $15/hour (unless in an unpaid internship). So, $15/hour * 160 hours = $2,400. That's more than most of the PhD students are living on here... and we have to live on that amount for about five years, not just a summer! (We don't work 40 hour weeks, which is why we get the low wages.) If you aren't liking your low-paid internship opportunities, you probably should consider a career in another field. There is a high correlation between poorly paying internships and poorly paying full-time jobs.[/QUOTE] Someone working full time does not always get at least 40 hours. Pennsylvania's requirement for a one hour lunch break in any shift that works 5+ hours turns full time into 35 hours much of the time (7 hours worked plus 1 hour lunch break for 8 hours out of your day). Also, the comment about grossly underpaid interns getting at least $15/hour. Are you seriously that closed off from the real world? There are lots of internships, even ones with stipends that will never net you 2400$ a week. In fact, getting an actual full time job anywhere off the street and expecting $15/hour and 40+ hours a week is damn near impossible. Compute it some more. $2400 a week all year long would net you $124800 in a year (granted, a bit less when you take off vacation time or more because of overtime). She didn't include the numbers because they vary depending on the internship and the field. You pulled numbers out of your ass and they were horribly, unbelievably wrong. I think she was the more wise in this situation.

[QUOTE id="3595e18b-4d6f-4ed6-82f7-be1dca94fea9"]If you want to work in The City over the summer, pull the silver spoon out of your mouth, and look for a cheaper apartment in *gasp* Brooklyn.[/QUOTE] As a native New Yorker, I'm always pumping Brooklyn to Penn students moving to New York. Most react with predictable (and totally unfounded) horror. But this isn't a "silver spoon" scenario. She's looking for *summer* housing. Landlords don't sign three-month leases too often, which is why summer dorms in New York are in such demand (and thus expensive).

I've had a number of internships in Washington, DC and NYC... some paid, some unpaid (one of them paid a $10/DAY stipend, which was laughable). Anyway, while I sympathize with the author's predicament (because I, too, cannot afford to live in a metro area on my own), she doesn't offer any solutions...probably because there are none. This is a fact of life. Deal with it. You have to limit your search to paid positions or seek outside funding, such as a part-time job, your own business, or grants/scholarships (some are available thru Penn, depending on the job). Op-eds should be about advocating solutions to problems, not whining about problems that many of us face but have no solutions b/c they're a fact of life.

we all got problems, no one cares about yours

Ali, looks like you need to straighten out your priorities.

Another shit, unoriginal article from Jackson. Next week - why girls shouldn't be so skinny...

I agree with the above comment, for I too am unimpressed. Maybe next you can tackle the dining hall employees wearing hair nets, or how the cool kids won't let you participate at pep rallies. In all seriousness, if someone on earth actually finds you funny then I give up.

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