As a new professional, I have both recently held paid and unpaid internships and supervised paid and unpaid interns. My unpaid internship at the Planning and Development Services Department of the City of Columbia, South Carolina exposed me to valuable experiences that played an integral role in Historic Macon Foundation hiring me. However, I was only able to take this unpaid internship because I lived in Columbia. My paid stint as the Friends of Andersonville Historical Interpreter and Curatorial Intern allowed me enough funds to commute to the park, but the stipend was not enough for me to afford rent and living expenses locally in Americus, Georgia.
The pattern of geographic limitation I saw in my personal experience of unpaid and small stipend internships remains clear in my experience interviewing and supervising graduate-level interns for Historic Macon Foundation. Our first two interns were unpaid, but both were either local or had a local connection for housing. Additionally, both interns had family support to help with other living expenses. We opened our internship application in 2015, expecting we would be able to offer our interns free housing; however, unexpected circumstances prevented us from offering housing in compensation. During the interview process, I asked the applicants, who were studying throughout the country, if they would be able to participate in our internship program if we were not able to offer housing. The unanimous answer was no from everyone except our local student.
Besides excluding individuals who are unable to live while working as an unpaid intern, unpaid internships have negative effects the interns themselves, the institutions they serve, and the profession. Historic Macon Foundation has a full-time staff of eight employees, and as the intern supervisor, I aim to create a culture where our interns are treated as new professionals. Despite my efforts, I have noticed that our unpaid interns were asked more often to perform menial tasks, such as cleaning or running errands. Our staff is small enough that everyone occasionally has to help labeling mailings or loading/unloading supplies for events. However, unpaid interns are much more likely to spend extra time on these tasks than paid interns are. This mindset further limits the opportunities for unpaid interns to learn on the job.
Most public history interns are seeking these experiences to further their education and career, so they generally are motivated to work hard. The efforts of unpaid interns within an institution can raise the expectations for other volunteers to an unreasonable level. Most volunteers are not going to work twenty to forty hours a week, nor do they have the same public history training as interns. Some volunteers feel that their long term support and work for an organization, which is equally if not more important than an unpaid intern’s shorter tenure, is no longer important. Volunteers are more inclined to view paid interns as an extension of the organization’s professional staff.
The dirty secret of jobs in public history is that degree is no longer the prerequisite for an entry-level position. Applicants almost always have to have experience in the field, typically acquired through internships, in order to be hired. With the challenges the U.S. economy has faced in the twenty-first century, the rising requirements for entry-level positions are not a problem unique to public history. However, the nature of our oft-limited budgets in pubic history means that we do have a predominance of unpaid internships. The National Council on Public History sits in a position to help address this issue.
With public history institutions always trying to do more work with less funding, new professionals need the experience from internships to help their organizations meet high standards. The growing importance of internships is not necessarily a problem for the profession. There are some skills and lessons that cannot be taught in the classroom. For example, professors can talk about what it is like to work for a nonprofit organization, but students cannot understand the variety of any nonprofit’s work without the actual experience.
The question of those of us in the profession is to find a way to give all students the opportunity for these necessary experiences, without depriving cash-strapped public history institutions from labor that is often necessary to their core functions. NCPH should create a profession-wide certification of ethical internships and encourage other related professional organizations, such as the American Association for State and Local History and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, to do likewise. When universities place interns, they should encourage students to participate in these certified internships, and if institutions want to continue working with excellent students, they will be pushed to achieve this certification.
The certification process itself could involve checking that the hosting organization will actually be providing interns with an educational experience and not simply using them as an additional workforce. Furthermore, institutions should compensate interns in some manner, if the interns’ labor benefits the institution in some way. In other words, if hosting an intern only costs an organization staff time and/or funds, and the organization gains no benefit from the intern’s work, then compensation beyond the educational experience is not necessary. If, however, the intern’s research is useful to the work of the organization, then that intern should gain additional compensation. Compensation can take the form of a paycheck, free housing, both. Whether or not an organization’s internship program received certification as an “ethical internship” would need to be determined case-by-case, based on whether or not the compensation offered provided enough to cover the interns’ living expenses. While this certification process or something similar may not be the solution to ensuring that the now-necessary public history internship is made equitable for both students and institutions, NCPH and those of us involved with placing and supervising interns need to at least begin making efforts to ensure we are not making the field of public history more exclusive.
~ Kim Campbell, Historic Macon Foundation
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