Report
‘Paying to be unpaid’ Climbing the career ladder can be a precarious journey for many students, and often, an unpaid internship is the bottom rung. What they lose in the process goes beyond just a lack of pay by Madeline Nguyen Illustrations by Andrea Ramirez
This summer, no one saw Lauren Bly. At least, no one saw the Lauren Bly they knew before. Before this summer, the junior studying journalism had never experienced a panic attack — a world-crumbling explosion of pent-up anxiety so overwhelming she initially mistook it for a heart attack. Before this summer, she hadn’t sought the help of a mental health professional in years, and she wasn’t fainting “all the time” from stress-triggered flare-ups associated with her dysautonomia — a nervous system disorder that impacts her body’s automatic processes, like heart rate and blood pressure. Before this summer, she wasn’t driven to utter exhaustion, her body so thoroughly sapped of energy that moving her limbs felt like dragging them against rushing water. “You look like you’re killing yourself,” Bly’s mom told her. “You look like the skeleton of a person that I knew, like a shell. What are you doing?” Before this summer, she had never held an internship. When Bly was contacted about
an open internship at a Phoenix area TV station, the perfect work opportunity seemed to fall right into her hands: the chance to snag coveted on-air time as a student journalist and hone the skills that class projects simply couldn’t provide. She didn’t realize the internship would be unpaid until she was face-to-face with her employment contract. She took the job anyway, despite the $1,000 price tag to register the internship for summer session credit and roughly $80 a week for gas commuting to the studio. “Experience — that was all I thought about,” Bly said. She thought she could feasibly earn money by working a variety of odd jobs — from dog walking to a paid position at Arizona PBS — outside the roughly 10 hours a week she was told she’d work as an intern. But 10 hours on paper became up to 18 hours in reality. The loans she took out to pay rent in absence of money she couldn’t cobble together added yet another weight. The constant grind of taking
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