New College Graduates Increasingly Forced to Settle for Internships-Many Unpaid

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/opinion/31herbert.html?em

by hachiya • 17 years ago

23 33 17 years ago

patio11• 17 years ago

I know much of HN is younger folk. If you find yourself without "traditional" employment, I'd suggest busying yourself creating lasting value for yourself rather than just doing passive search for a job.

The typical send-letters-and-wait-by-the-phone game is for suckers. For one, it doesn't really let you differentiate from the other 20% of your age group who don't have jobs. (Your resume theoretically lets you, but no one really cares what is written on it.) For another, everything that doesn't result in at least an interview is just wasted time. If you spend 6 months writing and then get a job interview, you've now got an interview and six months you will never get back which did not add to your personal capital at all.

Instead, built something you can keep. If you're a techy, write software. (Heck, build an entire business. You've got more than enough time.) If you're not a techy, you have my sympathies, but at least get yourself a blog going and start writing like it is going out of style. Set yourself up as the expert on your little patch of whatever and own the daylights out of it. Then, use it to network. Even if you can't get a job directly related to your niche, you can use the blog as an example of writing skill, communication skill, ability to carry tasks to completion, etc etc.

[Edited to add: It kills me that a sizable fraction of the best writing I've done in my life was a) on subjects I didn't really care about and b) will never be seen by anyone again, because I graduated from college many years before I heard of Dropbox. Most intellectually engaged students produce vast, vast quantities of great writing on subjects of perhaps less-than-great importance because they're told to... and then stop writing after college. Don't be most people -- most people's competitive situation sucks, because they have to compete with most people.]

gaius5• 17 years ago

The typical send-letters-and-wait-by-the-phone game is for suckers

True story: my first industry job I got by literally walking in the door of an ISP with no appointment and no CV and just asking if they needed a Unix guy. Wait there, they said. Met the hiring manager that afternoon (my "interview" was a in-depth discussion about the kind of workloads SMP was good for, conducted sitting on a DEC Alpha box), started working for him the next day.

This was at the start of the summer, at the time I still fully intended to be a Mechanical Engineer after graduation. Kinda got a bit sidetracked and here I am still in the industry 13 years later...

davidw2• 17 years ago

I agree completely with the spirit of what you write, but I wonder about something:

> If you're not a techy, you have my sympathies, but at least get yourself a blog going and start writing like it is going out of style

That's really night and day from the techy option of hacking on stuff. I got my first job because while I was unemployed, I spent my time learning my way around Linux and Perl (this was in 1997) until I had enough experience to be employable at the relatively low rate I was more than happy to accept (and which subsequently went up pretty quickly when I proved myself).

My wife, on the other hand, has a doctorate in biochemistry. While she might get a little mileage out of writing a blog were she unemployed, the advantages would probably be minor compared to the disadvantage of being out of touch with a laboratory and not able to read expensive scientific publications.

Point being, I think that sometimes we forget just how easy it is to get involved with stuff in the tech world. With an internet connection, a $500 laptop, free tools and mostly free documentation, you can do world-class work, and communicate with pretty much anyone you want to about most anything. How many other fields are like that? Hopefully, the world will head in that direction, because it really is a wonderful thing.

fabjan• 17 years ago

> the disadvantage of being out of touch with a laboratory and not able to read expensive scientific publications.

Not everyone can have a lab of their own, but is access to publications really that expensive? Here in Sweden, I just had to register for a course at the local university (which was free), and then get a computer account to have access to all the publications everyone else at the university have access to.

Alex3917• 17 years ago

I think the secret to success is sort of fourfold:

1) Shipping -- more important than anything else, hands down. And don't just ship products, create assets which can get bigger in the future.

2) Learning -- not just about your industry (that should be a given), but about everything that's important for understanding the world and how it works. And not from the Internet, from mentors and books.

3) Writing -- post stuff on your blog that helps other people and makes you look smart. Maybe even write a book or two depending on whether your interests are conducive to that.

4) Networking -- Know at least 500 people in each of the major US cities where your business operates. Know at least 6 superconnectors in each city who you can ask for help if you need it. Know at least 2,000 people total.

pmjordan2• 17 years ago

Interesting to see that this is now starting to happen in the US too. In the German speaking parts of Europe the age group of ~20 to ~30-year-olds is now often referred to as "Generation Praktikum" ("generation internship"). There seems to be an endless demand for programmers though.

tseabrooks• 17 years ago

I didn't see mention of what the degrees these young people's degrees are in. Are these degrees in areas with little to no demand, "I'm majoring in Latin American Art history", or are these people getting degrees in highly in demand areas? My software shop is hiring developers and recent grads all the time - we hired 5 people in the last 2 months.

gaius5• 17 years ago

The kind of person who does Art History in the first place is the kind of person whose family has the money to support them to essentially pursue their hobby full-time for 4 years. So the internship thing is not actually a big deal in the grand scheme of things - their families can afford to continue supporting them, until they can find a lifestyle job.

People do science and engineering for the love of it, sure, but these kinds of people don't forget that someday they'll need to support themselves. It's not only the skills but the down-to-earth attitude that makes these people such prized commodities in the job market.

ido• 17 years ago

   The kind of person who does Art History in the first place is the kind of person whose family has the money to support them to essentially pursue their hobby full-time for 4 years.

Not necessarily, I know several people who studied liberal arts and did so by getting student loans and scholarships.

unalone4• 17 years ago

Sometimes people care more about what they love than they do about whether they can support themselves with it. Please don't assume every person passionate about the arts is spoiled and rich.

jacobolus• 17 years ago

I don't think you realize how offensive your tone is in these posts. You're dismissing huge swaths of human creative and intellectual activity with sarcastic derision. We get that you're not interested in art history, literature, social sciences, etc. Either figure out a way make that point dispassionately, or find something else to talk about, or you're going to make enemies pretty quickly.

(Also, the humanities and social science majors I know are just as down-to-earth and hard working as the science students. They have tremendous skills, albeit different ones; solving tricky differential equations isn't everything in the world.

The problem is not that these graduates are unskilled, but rather that the whole economy has taken a nosedive, and the kinds of jobs they used to take, which required their intellectual skills, just don't exist in their previous numbers. For example, as described in the article, media and advertising are being crushed.)

pmjordan2• 17 years ago

This is Europe, but: my girlfriend is in this sort of situation, and she has a Master's degree in mathematics. Basically, if you can't enter a job with zero training, you're screwed. Everyone expects you to be 100% productive instantly. The entry-level has become unpaid if you're lucky, or disappeared completely.

A separate problem which compounds this is that European universities have been switching to the Anglo-American Bachelor/Master system from the previous diploma system, and many employers consider these new titles to be worthless.

maximumwage• 17 years ago

Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, or emotional stability required to make it through an engineering degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?

yardie• 17 years ago

My last internship I was miserable in. Because I was working for free I had to take a second "real" job to make ends meet. In the end it worked out. I busted my ass, networked and after a few months, found a real job.

The dearth of unemployed college students means it's a race to the bottom. If companies could pay less than minimum wage they would. So the next down is to relist the job as an unpaid internship.

rg• 17 years ago

Need to look up what "dearth" means.

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Our education system is failing =(

TheElder• 17 years ago

This is why I worked full-time through undergrad and graduate school. By the time I finished grad school (in computer science), I already had years of experience on my resume from full time employees and short term contracts. It's my solid work experience that got me my current position after graduation, not my MS in CS.

I don't expect the entitled American youth to sacrifice like that though. Now I understand why H1's are so popular, they have experience, work them to death for less pay, and the joy of not dealing with entitled American youth.

Even outside of tech, for example in the medical field, hospitals are paying for massive amounts of SE Asians to move here for nursing positions. The hospitals can't find people for these good paying jobs, so they have to go outside of the US for people to fill these positions.

eserorg2• 17 years ago

If you are young, energetic, and college-educated with a solid background in an engineering discipline, there are jobs for the taking in the oil business.

The average age of an employee at an oil and gas E&P (exploration and production) company in 2009 is 55 years old. These are highly prized employees with experience and knowledge that is in short supply in the industry.

Over the next 25 years (through 2035), the global hydrocarbons industry is estimated to invest 22 TRILLION dollars of capital (2009 USD) to meet what is expected to be a doubling of world energy demand.

Do the math.

Computer scientists, chemical engineers, geophysicists, mechanical engineers, biologists, petroleum engineers, etc... It doesn't matter. You would be surprised at the voracious appetite of the global hydrocarbons industry for new technology and talent.

I'm obviously biased, being in the business myself. But, the next time you're at a college engineering job fair, spend a few minutes at the booths of the E&P companies. You may be intrigued.

There's no business like the oil business.

barry-cotter• 17 years ago

How do you think they'd react to (a) Economics (b) Econometrics? I'm going to guess (a) would be laughed at but that a quasi-statistician can always find work in a field with lots of data.

eserorg2• 17 years ago

I can speak to the value of multivariate optimization in the oil and gas business.

Specifically, the U.S. onshore natural gas business is currently focused on what are called shale gas "resource plays". These are large contiguous blocks of acreage -- hundreds of thousands of acres -- over which thousands of wells are drilled one-after-another, in a manufacturing process. What makes this possible is a large, contiguous, underlying resource of natural gas reserves, trapped in tight rocks.

The key to profitably exploiting these resource plays is finding the right "formula" that can be repetitively applied to drilling and completing each well. There is no time to individually sit down and engineer each well. All you can do is analyze the data after the fact.

The profitability of each gas well is influenced by hundreds of variables. For instance, you have to "fracture stimulate" a gas well using a variable combination of hundreds of chemicals, each in a varying volume, with a variable pressure, to a variable depth. The well itself may have a variable number of frac stages, with a variable number of horizontal lateral wells connecting it to the reservoir, with a variable length for each lateral.

The question you have to answer is: given thousands of data points over thousands of individual wells, what is the most profitable "formula" for drilling a well in a particular resource play? Profitability is defined as the present value of the discounted future cash flow of the well using a discount rate of 10% -- you'll hear people talk about "the PV10". You know how each well has performed after it was drilled, you know what its profitability was, and you know what formula was applied to drill and to complete it. And you have this data for hundreds of wells -- each using a different combination of variables. And there's new data added every day.

There is a _lot_ of money riding on the right answer to this question.

There is a _massive_ amount of data in the oil and gas business. And every year there are entirely new classes of data being generated. 2D seismic, then 3D seismic, then microseismic, completion data, well logs, magnetic, gravity, surface linears, etc...

It's not surprising that one of the largest customers to the supercomputing industry -- after defense -- is the oil and gas business.

One trick here is that this data is usually locked up inside proprietary databases shared amongst companies in different industry consortia. So, you really have to be a player in the business to have access to the data -- that doesn't mean that you have any clue how to analyze it, however.

And there are big QA problems with this data, too. So, you have to deal with that as well.

holdenc• 17 years ago

For as long as I can remember kids with college degrees have always felt entitled to a job. And I have never understood why.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

Oh this is so true. And all I can say is: ha-ha-ha, sucks to be them. I graduated from college this June with a degree in PSYCHOLOGY, and I have a lucrative job. My secret? I started applying for jobs in the October before I graduated. I targeted three metro areas, and posted my resume every few weeks on the respective craigslist; I repeatedly sent in resumes for every position on craigslist/monster that I was remotely qualified for; I networked. And eventually, someone emailed me from one of my craigslist postings and I landed a job.

I don't pity anybody in my graduating class who doesn't have a job. Obviously they aren't smart enough to deserve one.

abalashov• 17 years ago

I think your indictment of your peers is neither realistic nor fair, if for no other reason than from a bare quantitative perspective.

For every person who is "not smart enough" to get a job, there are several for whom jobs are not available, but whom you can rationalise as "not smart enough" in order to make yourself feel better about your own luck.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

I explicitly described how I made my own luck. I doubt any of my whiny unemployed peers undertook similar efforts, applying for 300+ jobs. I would mention my gpa but I don't want to add insult to injury.

wookiehangover• 17 years ago

As a college dropout and business owner at 23, I believe that its the personal responsibility of every American to have a marketable skill that they can get paid for. American Universities no longer provide this--they're playpens for the 18-22 year old set, most of whom are there simply out of obligation to their parents wishes.

If college in American isn't dead, it's certainly dying.

I didn't land a dream job in the tech community immediately after dropping out. I worked in retail for 2 years, while freelancing on the side and keeping a blog which I updated daily. When I did finally get hired, all of those things were evidence that I had a work ethic outside the context of a classroom.

Anyone can be smart in high school, anyone can do well in college, but if you're unable to hustle to get your foot in the door, don't expect me to feel bad for you.

New College Graduates Increasingly Forced to Settle for Internships-Many Unpaid

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