Stuff White People Like - Unpaid Internships

Internship: Any official or formal program to provide practical experience for beginners in an occupation or profession. When I was in college, I knew many people who would do ANYTHING to get an unpaid internship, including spending a lot of money to network to get that internship.

Shock blogger Stuff White People Like, says, if you were to present a white 19 year old with the choice of spending the summer earning $15 an hour as a plumber’s apprentice or making $0 answering phones at Production Company, they will always choose the latter. In fact, the only way to get the white person to choose the plumbing option would be to convince them that it was leading towards an end-of-summer pipe art installation.

White people view the internship as their foot into the door to such high-profile low-paying career fields as journalism, film, politics, art, non-profits, and anything associated with a museum. Any white person who takes an internship outside of these industries is either the wrong type of white person or a law student. There are no exceptions.

If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free. In fact, the transition to full time status results in the addition of only one new responsibility: feeling superior to the new interns.

So if you're having a margarita at Rio Grande and overhear someone complaining about their internship at Google... Just remind them that after the cost of a summer in the NYU dorms and bottles at Marquee, they are paying a lot for that internship. But then again if you are having happy hour at Rio Grande or partying at Marquee, chance are you are a white person who once had an unpaid internship.

Listen up Interns - Get 8 hours of Sleep!

I know what you're thinking... This is my SUMMER! I want to be out late every night and living up the club scene. But if you think your performance at work will be the same if you get back from Marquee at 4am rather than going to sleep at a decent hour, you're wrong. You NEED sleep if you want to perform well. But of course if you have an internship with a family friend and you don't give a crap about your job or if messing up making copies then go out and have fun!

A technique recommended by the Wellness Blogger Cohen Family Wellness to help you fall asleep is called "4 x 4 breathing". My patients who perform this exercise are getting longer hours of sleep, better quality of sleep, increased energy the next day, and many other health benefits. Here is a step by step guide to perform the exercise.

1) Breathe in for 4 seconds.
2) Hold breath in for 4 seconds.
3) Breathe our for 4 seconds.
4) Hold breath out for 4 seconds.

Summer Internship 2009!! -- Plan NOW

With the 2008 Summer already half way gone :(, it's time to start thinking about next year. If you want to keep the same internship that you have this summer, you better be a performer. Only the top interns are offered repeat internships. If you want to try out something new, but are not sure what, then you need to start thinking about what it is that you want to pursue. Having an internship in the field that you want to pursue after college is key to have an upper advantage on the vast competition.

Network, network, network. Other than being lucky, networking is one of the basic keys in any business, and although this will be cliched by the time you're 30 - if it already isn't - there's a reason you hear it a lot. It works. Not every time, but if you asked a lot of people how they've gotten jobs, a large amount will probably have gotten them from friends, family or someone they met through work. Go through friends of friends and friends of family.

Keep your eyes and ears open at all times, and keep on trying to fight the good fight. Blood, sweat, tears and a good resume can take you a long way. Good luck and Godspeed.