My daughter is looking for a summer intern job in NYC, and has filled out several applications. They all ask: What salary are you looking for? As they don’t have interns in my company (they make do with ordinary wage slaves)I have no idea. Does anybody know what a college itern makes ?
What field is she going into?
For Computer Science, I’ve made $12-$16/hr as an intern, and something like $7 as an undergrad research asst. at a university.
Whoops, I meant $12-$13/hr
(where’d 16 come from? I musta done my math wrong)
When I was an IT manager in Cleveland, I paid my intern about $8 an hour…I’d guess that in NYC, it should be a couple more than that…keep in mind though that the purpose of getting an intern is so that you can pay less money…and the intern is not only getting valuable on the job knowledge, but in some instances, can get some college credit.
I think that would depend on the field. Have your daughter talk to someone at her school’s placement office about pay rates.
As a computer science major, I have recieved wages between $12/hr and $22/hr. The pay generally increases with the number of credit hours completed. Though I am making $18.40/hr now at Compaq. The $22/hr place was stuffy (I had to wear a TIE!) and stressful, and they put me in a cubicle.
I made $4.25 an hour at the Salk Institute in La Jolla as a lab intern doing research on rats to save the rest of your lives.
I’ve done about four or five internships, and never got paid for any of them.
Of course, that’s de rigeur for government and political work.
CS people: What classification were you when you were interns? I’m almost a junior (at 18, that always looks good!), but I’ve not had that much computer science so far. I would hate to get an internship and not know anything. What is the standard policy on that?
“I hear the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” -T.S. Eliot
Payment for interns is actually a real bonus. The concept of interning is to watch a business work in return for doing some small tasks. I did four internships when I was an undergrad and wasn’t paid for any of them. Now that I’m teaching all I hear are students not taking internships because there isn’t any pay.
I have seen mostly low hourly rates (as shown above) with no benefits. I guess now to grab interns a payment is required. The freebies aren’t too inviting anymore.
Sorry - I went in to old professor mode there for a second.
There are three kinds of people: Those who can count and those who can’t.
No one expects an intern to know anything, just to show a capacity for learning. It’s also why they don’t pay them, or the pay is very low.
When I went to UCSD you could get free medical care there and there would always be medical student interns in the room.
If you ever get medical treatment from an intern, you’ll know for a long long time.
I’ve worked for a very pompous Wall St firm where one of my tasks was to supervise a bunch of summer interns (computer science undergrads). They were paid minimal wage, and not expected to be very productive, and usually couldn’t do anything useful even if they wanted to. (The whole project was viewed as pure public relations.) I’ve also supervised summer interns in my current position where a) were hired based on merit (rather than being members of the right group) b) we hire about 1/4 as many per manager as my old job, c) we pay them the equivalent of $20-30 / hour (haggling allowed), d) we give them some concrete projects, work with them, and expect reasonable progress by August. Obviously they learn a lot more, both because they do real work and because we hire much smarter kids to begin with. But I feel we’re overpaying them. Some folks I know get their summer interns to work for free, in exchange for the opportunity to learn and a better shot at a f/t job after graduation. The moral is, it differs a lot by the field (comp sci vs. finance vs. something else) and by company and even by the department in a large company. In the long run, the difference between working for free and for minimal wage is immaterial. A wise student will pick the internship where she’ll learn as much as possible, rather than the one where she’ll be doing mindless clerical work, no matter what thee pay if any.
I hope this helps.
LongHrn99:
When I got my first internship, I had only has something like 3 CS classes (2 of those were in high school). So I didn’t know squat, but I wasn’t really expected to either.
So I ended up doing some database work for a sales and support group. Once they found out I could write slick macros for excel that would automatically make charts for them (!), they were so impressed.
I didn’t really learn anything that summer, which sucked, but I got some great recommendations (So the next year I got a real programmer-type internship).
So the moral is, go for the internship. Don’t worry about the number of classes you’ve had, you should easily be able to do some good work, and you’ll learn somehting about the workin’ world too.
Thanks, all, the information will be very helpful. When I said I would hate to not know anything, I meant that I would hate to be expected to know things that I didn’t know how to do. But I guess that’s all taken into consideration by the HR department.
“I hear the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” -T.S. Eliot