Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs

also get rid of unpiad and college only internships (paid or unpaid) We need to get rid of the idea of pay to work / work for free and pay full price for Credits.

Hmm. I work in an accounting practice, we occasionally get "interns" of two kinds.

Firstly, people who are in the break between high school and university, or who are considering a career change. The folks are mainly looking to see what it's like. There's also an element of being able to put study into some context and have an edge in future interviews. Employers feel like they're taking a gamble on someone who has no idea what the work is like, or what they're getting into, so it's a significant advantage. They are what I consider an internship is supposed to be about.

These folks are usually in for about a month and it's unpaid. It does feel like a tough month of hard work for them, because it's all new and we give them a taste of a range of things. The firm's pretty good about that actually; at the time it's daunting for the intern but it is exactly what they were hoping for and need.

What they're not doing though is producing anything of value. Sure they'll complete things, like a bank reconciliation, but they'll take maybe a day to do it. As the senior it'd take me about an hour to do the same thing myself, and I'll have spent at least that hour showing them what to do and then another hour checking it and bringing it up to standard for the file. Yes, per unit of productivity, interms end up a hell of a lot more expensive than seniors. It looks like work, feels like work, but it isn't contributing anything. What they're doing is basically a college exercise, just in a practical setting and without having to pay for the one-to-one tuition. It would actually be more efficient for the firm to treat it more explicitly like that i.e. give them photocopies and put what they do in the trash while I do the real work for the file, but it's important to convey the sense that they're contributing to the file, to a real-world thing that has importance, ramifications, standards, is part of a larger project... After all they didn't come here to do an exercise out of a textbook.

Unpaid interns are very expensive in my time. They get a very good return for their time investment. That's probably why all the interns I've seen have either been kids of clients, or someone making a career change who would be an obvious asset if they do decide the work is for them and join the firm. To be fair, that's probably also the reason the interns are getting such good value, I have heard of other firms who basically sit them down and make them do the photocopying or churn through bank recs non-stop, so they are producing value and overall saving time/cost of paid staff whilst getting very little of value from it.

The second kind were university students in the summer break. We've not done these for a few years now. They're paid not that much less than the juniors and for their 4-6 weeks they'll basically be new juniors. In other words horribly inefficient. Unlike juniors though, they go back to uni well before they become productive enough to return the training investment. It's basically a write off for the firm just on the prospect that maybe they'll come back after graduation, maybe if they go into industry they'll maybe put our name down when their employer tenders for a new accountant. I suspect the partners also used to think they were kind of getting some temps in during the busy season, but have cottoned on to the reality that they're a time-sink with a net burden on staff when things are already insanely busy. Maybe if they were unpaid and thus had a zero chargeout rate they might just about be worth it, but I doubt it and the partners do not consider that to be acceptable behaviour.

There's one thing that makes me certain in my assessment above. When we do get an intern, if we're in the off-season folks who aren't busy are interested in the interns, it's fun being tutor. But if busy, all the seniors and

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