National Council on Public History

1) Personal experience with placing and/or supervising paid and/or unpaid interns.

In my role as the internship coordinator for the Department of History and Philosophy at Kennesaw State University I am responsible for assisting students with locating appropriate internships and serve as their academic supervisor (as contrasted with their site supervisor at the internship location) throughout their internship. All of my interns are undergraduate students, and most of them are pursuing the public history certificate, a program for which I serve as the coordinator. Most of my students serve in unpaid internships, although our dean has recently mounted a campaign to find funding, either internally or externally, for paid internships.

I keep track of the interns throughout the semester through a combination of face-to-face meetings (usually three times throughout the semester) and the submission by students of weekly, online journal entries. For our mid-semester meeting, I invite someone from our career services office to lead a workshop on writing effective resumés and cover letters.

Most students receive 3 hours of academic credit for their internships. They must work at least 100 hours over the course of the semester.

I discourage students from pursuing internships with organizations that have no professional staff or from internship situations where there is no organizational structure into which the intern can fill a clearly defined role with professional supervision. Such situations inevitably lead to frustration on all sides and usually do not result in a worthwhile learning experience for the students.

2) Specific issues that your experiences have raised concerning the prevalence of unpaid internships and their impact on student interns, institutions, and the profession more generally.

Sadly, unpaid internships have become the norm in the profession. Most people end up working for free, either as an intern or as a volunteer, before they get a paid position. One consequence of this is that many students simply cannot afford to work for free if they have an alternative, paid position, even though that position is not in the profession. I have witnessed one of my most outstanding students, who had tremendous aptitude and enthusiasm for public history work, find herself boxed out of jobs because she did not have any volunteer work or internships on her resumé. This situation was, for the most part, out of necessity for her—she always felt that she needed to take paid positions, even if they were not in the field, over unpaid positions because she had student loans and other expenses.

On the institutional side, the expectation that you can get interns for free has become so widespread that everyone expects to get this free labor to supplement their existing work force—something that is a clear violation of labor laws. The argument can be made that internships are an extension of a student’s education; therefore, academic credit and experience gained substitute for wages. While I understand this argument, I am also keenly aware that the on-site supervision does not always rise to the level that it should, and sometimes internships fall well short of being worthwhile educational experiences.

3) Your assessment of the importance of internships in training public historians.

Internships are fundamental to training of public historians. While I incorporate real-world projects into my courses, nothing I can do as an instructor rivals the day-to-day experience of working in an organization and dealing with the various challenges and opportunities that arise. Through internships, students get practical experience in a variety of areas. They learn what they want to do as well as what they don’t want to do, both of which can be equally important.

4) Possible strategies or solutions that might make internships more equitable for all parties concerned.

One approach that I have argued for (largely in vain, sadly) at my university is that we waive the course fees from the university for interns. These fees, which have escalated dramatically in recent years and are not prorated to reflect a reduced summer course load, have made summer internships cost-prohibitive for my students. This is unfortunate since students usually can spend more hours per week at an internship than they can during the rest of the academic year. My argument has been that if students are at an internship site during the summer semester, they are not making use of the on-campus services that the fees are designed to cover. I have had success with this argument for interns who were serving at sites that are more than 50 miles from our campus, however, students with internships within 50 miles still have to pay the full slate of fees.

I am interested in having a broader discussion about other ways that we can make internships more affordable or accessible for students. How can we convince host organizations that these interns have value and should receive some sort of compensation? How can we convince our home institutions to provide more support for interns through fee waivers and other means of financial support? How can we better prepare our students to serve as valuable interns who are worth the investment of time and money that we should expect from host organizations?

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