As a public historian at the National Park Service I have supervised interns on various special projects throughout my career, particularly in the development of National Historic Landmarks nominations. Within the last five years the National Historic Landmarks program has managed the increasing demands in workload — particularly the development of nominations for innumerable heritage initiatives — by using paid internships as one of the solutions for dealing with an increasing burden on professional staff. This has been a beneficial arrangement for both the program and the intern when we receive a viable final product; however, it has also been the source of additional workload when the final nomination fails to meet certain professional standards and has to be rewritten by staff historians; a situation which I am not unfamiliar with.
The ethics of internships has been a topic which Lexi Lord, who served as the NHL program branch chief until recently, and I have discussed numerous times throughout the years within the context of our careers and program. More often than not these discussions would stem from conversations we would have about internships and their overall efficacy for the program, particularly when an intern failed to deliver on an assignment and I was left to figure out how to salvage a nomination. Do we spend more staff time reworking the nomination or do we allow it to linger unfinished until we are able to pay someone else to correct the issues? Do we spend more time training another intern to remedy the nomination and risk still not having a usable product? Oftentimes, because of political pressure to process these nominations I had no alternative but to dedicate time to finishing the nomination, at the expense of another project or task. And sometimes when discussing career goals we would venture into personal experiences with internships and the opportunities they have afforded us – in my case it was my entrée into the National Park Service. Inevitably, this would lead us into a discussion of the ethics of unpaid internships. Not only are they elitist by being accessible to only those who can afford to work without compensation, mainly the white upper-class, but they are inherently exclusionary of certain demographics, in particular, ethnic minorities. Our field already suffers from a lack of ethnic diversity — unpaid internships only widen the divide even further. Although the Smithsonian Institution has had a Latino internship program for decades now, it’s been only in the last several years that the National Park Service has instituted a similar program. I was surprised to learn that we as an institution are so far behind the curve. If we are to diversify the field we have to offer paid internships.
There are other inherent problems to not compensating interns — the overall devaluation of our work as professionals. The recent trend in our professional series in the federal government has been to downgrade positions while requiring more education than in the past. Where a master’s degree sufficed only several years ago to be competitive as a job candidate, now job seekers have to compete with candidates with PhDs. I have recently seen this trend in several National Park Service programs, not to mention other federal agencies, and it makes me wonder what this means for the future of our field. Is this going to become the new normal? This makes internship experiences even more vital to a candidate’s resume and not properly compensating them furthers the homogeneity of our field.
Internships are invaluable in translating skills learned in a classroom into real-world applications. You can be familiar with the theory undergirding a profession but if you are incapable of thinking critically and producing a deliverable, you will not be competitive. Writing an NHL nomination, for example, provides interns an opportunity to develop and refine those very skills that will serve them in future positions. Despite some of the failures we have experienced, we have also had success with interns who have later worked for us as contractors writing NHL nominations. Ultimately, this can be cost effective for the program in that receiving a well- written NHL nomination facilitates and expedites our review and processing of a nomination.
Paid Internship experiences are even more important now that the field is experiencing a growing number of graduates, including those with PhDs, vying for the same – and few — positions in our field. I strongly believe that it is our duty as professional to properly train and mentor the next generation of practitioners. Especially now when we are facing an aging federal workforce an issue which our program, as well as others, will have to manage in the coming years when we have mass retirements.
I look forward to furthering the conversation on the ethics of unpaid versus paid internships and how this has a material impact on our field, particularly on its ethnic diversity, in addition to the burdens this presents to an already overworked and understaffed program.