Note for visitors from #mac15: this post is a bit outdated as far as my current circumstances. I am now gainfully employed in my field as an archives assistant at an university in New Haven (yes, the one that starts with a Y). However, I think the comments on the internship are still relevant.
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During the weekend of April 24-26, 2014, the Mid-Atlantic Region Archives Conference (MARAC) spring event took place in Rochester, New York. While I certainly should have been there being professionally developed, I couldn't take the time off from my day job, nor could I afford the fees. However, I follow folks on Twitter who were there. And this is leading me to comment on a "funny" joke that is endemic to our profession.
During Session 8, "Going Virtual! Extending the Reach of a Project Once Funding Ends," panelists discussed their outreach methods after the initial funding is finished for creating and informing the masses about the project. According to Twitter updates, the conversation turned to how work continued without funding. That’s when someone cracked a joke about exploiting unpaid grad students. Because, you know, that’s what grad students are for.
Naturally, my friends who are grad students and recent graduates took to Twitter as well as the conference to strike back at this “hilarity.” I wish I could have been there. I also can point out the “exploitation” from personal experience.
As a graduate student in the Queens College GSLIS program, I had to take an internship course. Of course it’s a good idea to intern—it’s the best and almost always the only way to gain experience in the field these days. I had previously done an internship at the Louis Armstrong Archives, part of Queens College in an attempt to get this experience (ironically as I settled in there, I managed to get a part time job as an archival technician at the Municipal Archives in New York City where I received paid experience in the field). No matter what though, I was required to take this internship course.
The course consisted of interning for 150 hours in the semester, keeping a journal (some of the entries can be viewed on this blog), and writing a final paper and doing a small presentation. We met four times in the semester. Near the end of the semester I had a visit from one of the professors to review my workspace and to evaluate my competency. I did all of this without many qualms. I found a placement at the archive mentioned in this blog (albeit not by name), and did my processing. I passed the course, and I received valuable experience. I also am still at the archive, interning once a week to continue gaining experience.
This sounds like a good experience but let’s explore the qualms.
Let’s start with the course itself. It’s a required course at my school for archives students. You must take the course, or you don’t get the archives certificate. You do not get this course for free. While the school is cheaper than most (Queens College is part of CUNY, and I am a New York City resident, so I paid the lowest bracket tuition), it’s still a graduate school program, where it costs roughly $333 a credit. So I paid approximately $1,000 for a course that met four times in a semester, and with minimal oversight by professors.
Here’s another fun part of the internship course. You could not take a paid internship. It had to be purely for credit. Occasionally a student could bend that rule if their site had very firm rules about paying their interns, but this was not publicized by the department, and it was written in all the paperwork that it should be an unpaid internship for credit only. So I was paying the school to work for another institution for free.
Final consideration: this internship had to be 150 hours spread out over three and a half to four months (give or take). While it was up to us to figure out the timing, for many of us, we had to intern at least twice a week to make up that amount. I had a day job while doing the internship, and was also taking two other classes. I was stuck negotiating with my boss to go from approximately 24 hours a week to approximately 18 hours a week so I could intern and take my other classes. I was therefore paying to work for free, and losing other pay I could receive when I already don’t make a lot. I live with my parents, and they do charge me rent and I pay my bills. They wound up forgiving me my rent and a bunch of my bills so this way I could get by. However, I was lucky. I had a safety net. A good portion of my peers in library school do not necessarily have that net.
The final calculation: I lost 6 hours a week in pay during that semester-long course. A semester equals 15 weeks of this modified work schedule. I made $15 an hour at my job. Doing the math, I lost $1,350 in potential income (before taxes). We already established that I paid roughly $1,000 for the course. Therefore, I paid approximately $2,350 to work for experience.
The economy and the job market sucks. We all know that. Often to get any experience anywhere, you have to give time. More and more, entry level positions are becoming unpaid internships. This is especially true in cultural heritage institutions where they are dependent on grants, donors and budget allotments to keep their lights on, let alone have someone doing the processing for pay. For example, the librarian at my site likes me and wants to give me a paying job. Unfortunately, they do not have the budget to pay for an archivist. However, I am doing the work of an archivist--I am the de facto archivist in fact, because they don't have an official one at my site. This is great for the institution, but I don’t get paid, and I don’t get institutional privileges. In fact, it is still a form of paying to play as I need to buy myself the MetroCards to get to the archive. See how I didn’t get to attend MARAC? I didn’t have enough pay from my day job to do it myself, and I couldn’t get funding from the institution for professional development because, well, I’m not officially part of it. I have to worry about food and rent instead.
So the next time you want to joke about exploiting grad students, think about the math of free internships that just give experience. Because, yeah, you’re right, I was and am pretty darn exploited.
