Narcissistic. Entitled. Egotistical. These are just some of the glowing adjectives often used to describe my generation, the "me" generation. As a millennial, I resent the fact that my generation is often summed up as the kids whose parents awarded them ribbons, medals and gold stars just for participating. But sometimes my fellow gen Y-ers do things to prove that very point -- that we expect things to be handed to us without working for it.
Former law school students are now suing their law schools because they couldn't get a job after graduation. Former interns are now suing their employers because they didn't get enough training during their internships. Instead of blaming others and trying to launch class-action lawsuits against them, we need to take personal responsibility.
In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan State Supreme court last week, Lucy Bickerton, a 2007 PBS summer intern with Charlie Rose is suing Rose and his production company, claiming her unpaid internship violated New York labor law because she wasn't trained. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a company may legally offer unpaid internships if they are educational and benefit the intern and not necessarily the employer.
Bickerton claims she wasn't trained because she spent her internship providing background research for Mr. Rose about interview guests, assembling press packets, escorting guests through the studio, breaking down the interview set after daily filming and cleaning up the green room. But isn't researching an essential training skill would-be journalists should learn? Isn't the fact she was able to watch how Rose, one of the nation's most acclaimed interviewers, prepared and interviewed guests each day training in it self? Isn't the fact that she was able to work with Rose and top producers and pick their brains, if she wanted to, about how they got to where they are and whether they had any advice, beneficial?
I was an unpaid intern at a news station the same summer as Bickerton and did similar tasks, but I walked away feeling I had more practical job training than could be provided in a classroom. Yes, there were some menial tasks like printing and handing out scripts. But I'd also ask producers and correspondents each day to sit in the edit room with them so I could watch how stories were put together and ask questions to learn the process. Many of those same producers and correspondents I still keep in touch with to ask career advice. Your internship experience is what you make of it, and if you feel you didn't get sufficient training, you have only yourself to blame. Reporters, producers and editors are all busy people and they aren't going to take the time out of their day to check up on you, it's up to you to ask questions and to learn from them.
The biggest benefit of an unpaid internship is that it gives you the experience necessary to help find a job out of college. One reason I was able to get a job after graduation was because I had unpaid internships at news stations listed on my resume. And I'm sure Bickerton, who is now a documentary filmmaker, was able to get where she is in part because PBS is listed on hers.
The unpaid internship is a flawed system where colleges and companies often blur the lines in order to get away with it. Yet it's also productive, necessary, and the only system that works. If the unpaid internship were done away with, many companies, especially a publicly-funded broadcast station, would not be able to afford interns and thus do away with their internship program altogether, only hurting college students in the end.
Just as Bickerton's suit is placing blame on her employer because she didn't get the experience she wanted out of it, a group of former law students are now suing their law schools because they didn't get the jobs they wanted out of school.
Attorney Jesse Strauss appeared before Manhattan Supreme Court last week to argue that New York Law School fudged its job placement rate numbers, misleading applicants to believe they'd be guaranteed a job after graduation. The suit says the school duped students by claiming that "the overwhelming majority of its students -- 90 to 95 percent -- secure employment within nine months of graduation."
Strauss' clients include Matthew Crawford, a 2010 NYLS grad, who is now living with his parents in St. Louis and working at a Starbucks, and Katherine Cooper, also a 2010 grad, who says she even had to consider a position as a Sears sales clerk after graduation. Cooper says she decided on NYLS "because job statistics were huge for me. I wanted reliable work after graduation."
Yet, you can't blame your law school because you didn't get the job you wanted. There are so many other factors that go into getting a job at a top law firm: good grades, a high student ranking, a good interview, a strong resume, and simply entering a strong job market in a good economy. You don't get a job just because your law school guaranteed you'd get one in their employment statistics provided on application brochures. You can't blame a school because you spent thousands of dollars of tuition money and didn't get the job you wanted because, at the end of the day, it was your own choice to go to school.
One reason why older generations so often call us entitled is because we think we deserve a good job, a good internship, whatever it may be, without working for it and when we don't get what we want, we blame everyone but ourselves. Filing potential class-action lawsuits is certainly not helping us get rid of the stigma. So please, fellow millennials, lets stop it with the lawsuits and start taking some personal responsibility.
Follow Mari Fagel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/YourLegalLady
Businesses cannot simply get unpaid interns for routine work which an employee would normally be paid for. That's exactly what cleaning the green room, breaking down sets, etc is. No one can argue that the guest research wouldn't have been done if she wasn't there.
Businesses cannot just expect free labor for a few months at the expense of those in college. If the writer experienced the same type of internship, then she too was taken advantage of.
Personal responsibility should be encourage; however we should not overlook bad behavior for the sake of it.
If an intern's given tasks that benefit the goals of the company, that implies work someone could/should be paid to do.
If they're NOT given such tasks, then what does the employer have them DO? If the interns don't get useful tasks, then what? If they get tasks that are NOT useful, then, why bother? It is useless for both parties.
If the company doesn't give any tasks at all, but provides training, it simply becomes an extension of the educational process. Why should/would a company give free education to interns? Will it give them exams, then hire the best students? They can do that, but that simply duplicates the information that transcripts and recommendations from a long education already provides.
Unpaid internships are either illegal or useless.
On the other hand, paid coop programs are great! Great benefits for both parties.
Coops were paid, but not a lot. They were assigned tasks to match current skills.
The coop got a job and great professional experience; a chance to see how real companies work. Good ones got a job offer at the end.
We got cheap labor, usually a bright employee, and potential future hire. If they didn't work out, that was OK. It lowered our hiring risk considerably.
Why do progressives pan lawschool grads who were told by the school that 95% of graduates were employed after graduation when the school knowingly manipulated those numbers?
Some college degrees just don't translate professionally in the real world. And $120,000 to develop an interest in the Komodo Dragon or Jazz Studies seems to mee too steep a price to pay.
Well, if an institution puts forth false or intentionally misleading statistics regarding the product, then, just like any other product, the institution is liable.
"You can't blame a school because you spent thousands of dollars of tuition money and didn't get the job you wanted because, at the end of the day, it was your own choice to go to school."
Financial constraints shouldn't affect one's ability to obtain an higher education - only ability and academic prerequisites should do that. Of course, no university can guarantee a job to its graduates. But, given that that is the case, at least education should not leave the graduate even worse off: no job, but lots of debt. No other developed country does this to its students, or at least not anywhere near to the degree that institutions in the United States do. I don't hear anyone calling Germans a bunch of whiners because they all graduate from university debt-free.
Sounds like you'd like our debt riddled government to go even farther into hock so a nation that already has too many lawyers can pay for some more? Thanks for nothing!
Will you also call for the costs of said education to be reduced by the 'educators' reducing their salaries to the levels of public school teachers? What about the athletic departments of said schools? Do you want them eliminated, so as to reduce expenses?
You bring up Germany, and their 'free' education. What do they pay the instructors?
Compare apples to apples.
A few educators are very highly paid, and certainly university presidents are well paid, but it has been the practice in recent decades to use adjuncts who are paid worse than elementary school teachers, and often don't even receive benefits.
Well, at state universities, if athletics are costing the taxpayer a lot of money, they might need to have their spending cut. Of course, many football and basketball programs claim to be self-supporting; or alumni can fund athletics. Athletics are not the core mission of a university.
In Germany, you certainly don't have poorly-paid adjuncts.
Apples to apples my friend.
And so long as student loans are being used to fianance these thngs the taxpayers are getting stuck with the bills- and have the right to say no when corporate abuse of the system is so widespread. If school "X" says 95% of its graduates are employed when that is not true, then they're liable for that dishonesty.
It's the main reason I dislike modern feminism so much. They are allergic to accountability.
But I also dislike those who condescendingly advocate "personal responsibility" in the wake of criminal greed and irresponsibility.
For some reason, I got the same vibe reading this article that I did when a few years ago, hedge fund managers were writing op-eds explaining how it was immoral for a homeowner to walk away from an underwater mortgage...all while they executed "strategic defaults."
Most of the people I know tend to be the equal pay for equal work, combined with making sure girls (and guys) know that there are no girls or guys jobs or interests.
Then again, these are the feminists of science and engineering professions, not the academics.
When a baby boomer accuses you of having an entitlement mentality, it's a sure sign that you've got some world-class issues with personal responsibility to deal with. I want to be standing well behind the yellow line when the United States' economic system finally comes crashing down, enrolling these folks perforce in the graduate school of contemporary reality (wherein you take the test first and learn the lesson second).
I know I would be angry if I had followed the previous generation's advice and then ended up right back where they promised me that I would never have to be.