I’m (20f) currently in my sophomore year of undergraduate school (BS marine biology) and am looking for internships. My advisor stressed to me not to take any internship that isn’t paid, and as I’ve been searching I’ve found that a paid internship is extremely rare. Any internship I’ve found in the work I’m especially interested in requires relocation WITHOUT providing housing, 40 hours per week minimum, and no hourly or stipend pay. How can this be legal? It’s not idle desk work either it’s physical labor and specialized lab and field work skills. It’s so discouraging because to get any experience in my field I need to somehow pay for a place to live plus gas and food just to work for free full time. I just needed to rant about it because who is actually doing these internships? It’s certainly not the students who pay for their own school and come from poor backgrounds already.
The funniest (not funny just morbidly amusing) part is I found an internship that requires the intern to pay THEM $1500 in order to do unpaid work for them.
Especially in STEM, companies, labs, etc know they can get away with this because internships are a requirement for us to get into graduate school or any job in the fields.
Apologies for spelling and grammar I typed this on my phone.