Zachary Noyce | Pay me, please

I've pretty much made up my mind about this: I would like to have a good job someday.

While I haven't conducted any scientific testing yet (and I'm seriously questioning whether that grant will ever get approved), I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone.

These are different days from those of our parents. We know and accept that most of us will have several different jobs in our working lives - even several different careers. To many of us, that's probably a big part of why we decided that attending a school like Penn could be worth facing the tuition, the term papers and the women screaming "Vagina!" at us over and over again on Locust Walk.

Call it arrogance. Call it competitive spirit. Call it careerbuilder.com Darwinism. We want to get a step ahead in our job hunt, and we're determined to do what it takes.

That's why you'll spend late nights scouring Web sites looking for the perfect internship and spend days wondering which professor to ask for a letter of recommendation - after all, only two of them even know your name. After all, working as an intern isn't just about being the punch line in a 90s Jay Leno monologue. If you apply for a job without an internship on your resume, you might as well admit that you came in third place in your fourth-grade spelling bee. You don't stand a chance.

Regrettably, a lot of the internships landed by Penn students don't come with a paycheck.

The Office of Career Services insists that any internship can be a useful experience. "It may be tough to get through that summer" without an income, Claire Klieger, associate director of Career Services told me, "but a good internship will end up paying for itself."

Unfortunately, while it may pay for itself, it won't pay for much else. Last I checked, landlords and fast food joints don't accept "life experience" as a form of payment. Living without a paycheck is much easier said than done.

More often than not, expediency and pure desperation push students to accept unpaid, demanding internships.

Melody Kramer, a 2006 Penn graduate who now directs NPR's Wait Wait . Don't Tell Me!, decided that her credentials as a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist simply wouldn't take her as far as she wanted to go in her career. (Crap!)

After two years of saving the money she earned at two on-campus jobs, she accepted an unpaid internship at Esquire magazine. More than a little nervous about living in New York City without an income, she now admits, "I had no connections, no idea how to break into journalism."

Some industries are notorious for refusing to pay interns. Director of Career Services, Patricia Rose emphasized, "The bottom line is there are industries that don't pay [interns], and many of them tend to be quite glamorous." And if we were to refuse to apply for an unpaid internship - out of principle or necessity - "there's a long line of people who want to break into that industry."

Kramer perceived a similar motivation in her former employer. "I think Esquire thought it could get away with it, as a lot of journalism jobs do."

Could Penn do anything about it? That's a pretty tricky question, too.

Rose lamented, "We encourage employers to pay our students. I wish I could mandate that everyone pay, but I can't."

She told me that the various Ivy League career centers "have discussed [the problem of unpaid internships] many times over the years," but always conclude that refusing to list unpaid positions would do a lot more to limit the resources of students looking for an internship than to pressure employers into paying interns.

I may be tilting at windmills here, but I've made up my mind. I can't afford to choose "life experience" over food and housing.

And it's a matter of principle. People should be paid for the work that they do, even if they happen to do that work as interns. Companies shouldn't ask that kind of sacrifice from college students, and we shouldn't give it to them.

Zachary Noyce is a College junior from Salt Lake City, Utah. His e-mail is noyce@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Stormin' Mormon appears Mondays.

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