Popular wisdom has it that you have to have an internship at some point during the summer and that if you forego one to spend your time flipping burgers, backpacking or reading Dostoevsky, it will lead to a chain of events that in time will destroy your life. You will be rejected by potential employers, passed over for promotions, whispered about at the water cooler, divorced by your trophy spouse, abandoned by the ungrateful legacies you have spawned-in short, an utter nightmare.
Rewind to the present. Deep breaths. All is not lost, not yet. There are plenty of internships to be had. The only problem is, which ones are worth having? The internship "Bibles" and other assorted guidebooks frankly warn about dead-end internships where students spend so much time with the photocopier that they begin to glow in the dark. Even the slim chance of setting off a major political scandal is not enough to offset the generalized boredom of serving weak coffee, playing receptionist and running errands, especially unpaid. Yet more than a few companies have taken advantage of the internship vogue among students to provide themselves with such free labor. Other than in the case of someone volunteering to work pro bono for a small non-profit or artistic organization who really cannot afford to pay, that kind of miserliness is as ridiculous as it is discriminatory. It's particularly hard on students whose financial means are slender or nonexistent, forcing them to borrow money or simultaneously hold down a job if they want to hold onto the internship that rich kids can take without a second thought.
Yet one of the places where Amherst fails us is in its lack of aid, or even ideas, for those who don't necessarily plan on becoming professionals or dealing with money. Beyond the recruitment sessions with banking firms and the comfortingly high grad-school acceptance rate lies a great uncertain range of activities that is too seldom addressed. Shouldn't our much-touted liberal arts degree be something besides a gold pass into the gentlemen's club?
Unfortunately, at Amherst the "liberal" sometimes beats out the "arts" altogether and then I get the impression we are being schooled to be dilettantes: doctors, lawyers and businessmen who vote Democrat, read a few more books than average and perhaps dabble in watercolors in our spare time. For those who are happy with that, wonderful; but for those whose tastes draw them in other directions, a more welcoming attitude on the part of the College towards internships and other testings of the waters might help them find their "niche" sooner. Amherst might consider granting credit for internships during the year, as other respected liberal arts schools already have; I doubt the College's academic reputation would be too much tarnished by a recognition of practical usefulness. However, the lack of internship opportunities in the backwoods of Massachusetts, as opposed to the middle of New York City, means that, even if such credits were to come into existence, they would be rare.
What Amherst really needs to do is to throw its weight behind students looking for internships during the summer, the more so since it's the peak time at which people from other colleges want to intern as well, and so competition is bound to be keen. Most of the alumni I've profiled have mentioned an internship as a determining factor in their choice of career-whether or not they were related.
One more dimension of the ridiculousness generated by students' desperation to find an internship or other meaningful occupation during their time off from school has been the appearance of internship "placement" services, who in exchange for a hefty retainer fee-sometimes hundreds of dollars-claim to be able to hunt up the payer an internship in a field of their choice. A swindle? Yes, probably; but their justifying "pitch"-that their connections and professional familiarity with the world of internships allow them to locate opportunities that their clients would never have the time or resources to track down on their own-cannot be completely ignored. The false starts, dead ends and squandered time of already overworked students could be greatly reduced if Amherst had a full-time nerve center with just one or two people, even students, dedicated to the same kinds of tasks. It's certainly one of the least useless frills the administration could offer, costing only a fraction of the huge amount we pay for our education. And it would be worth every penny if it helped just a few of us avoid the traps and pitfalls of the internship search and gain an idea or two about what it is we might do with the rest of our lives. So, Amherst-how about it?
Setting the difficulties aside, internships contain the potential for tremendous growth and learning. (Note the use of the word "potential": otherwise it will sound as if I, too, am talking out of my ass.) They give students a chance to take a few steps down the road of a profession without committing themselves irrevocably to it.
Even if students don't take the path an internship has shown them, it has the incalculable benefit of compelling minds mostly trained on abstractions to apply themselves to more concrete efforts outside the rarefied air of the Amherst bubble, out there in the "real world." Though it might seem like a paradox, these opportunities are especially critical for students who don't necessarily want to take the straight path into corporate America-or are wavering between it and some other, more difficult but perhaps more rewarding destiny. For those of us in that position, we need to know what is out there before making that choice.