Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/09/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>The intern as a part-time administrator of this program is a great idea. >Maybe Leica could even pay the intern partly in gear, partly cash! I know, why doesn't Leica hire interns to run everything! Then they wouldn't have to pay any of those expensive wages and we'd all be much happier! In fact, if the whole factory was run by interns, then I bet they could pop out those digital backs for $250 each! I'm against the use of unpaid or underpaid interns. They're a terrible idea for humankind. It just creates more exploitation of people under the guise of "experience." I'm seeing a bad trend in america among my undergrads. If the student is lower-class, they can't afford to be an unpaid/underpaid intern. So they lose out on what is rapidly becoming a must-have summer-experience before getting a post-graduate job. Instead, they wait tables or bartend and make their Fall book money that way. I try to cap my courses at $100 of books, but with 4 courses a student, that's $400 a semester. Some of my less-wealthy kids spend the entire semester using library books -- which they can't mark on. If the kids are middle/upper class, then what's the harm? The harm is that this has caused both a depreciation of wages for summer work as well as an increasingly higher bar for entry-level post-graduate jobs. Basically it means that rich kids get to have the experiences that make them richer; and poor kids get to have the experiences that ensure they'll be bussing tables for the rest of their lives. The American Dream. I'm really on a downer (the election is bugging me). Sorry, haven't been taking my happy-happyhappy pills. Karen p.s. I was a summer intern at Canon, Inc . (Japan). while I was an undergrad. Great experience and even greater because they paid me real wages. It's also what convinced me that working at a large corporation was never going to be in my future. pps. Macalester College, where I work, is actually pretty good about the wealth disparity. It's actually uncool among the student population to be rich. So the parking lot isn't full of BMWs and Jettas. My previous workplace was a very elite college in the upper Northeast. Very elitist. One of the kids in my classes was a local scholarship kid. She was constantly teased because she bought her clothes at Walmart. She was so unhappy socially that she dropped out. I became a teacher in order to help equalize society and yet I often find myself a participant in its growing inequity. Sad..... So this is why I'm sensitive to these things.... -- Karen Nakamura http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/