Making internships count

When we seniors graduate in May, our brains will be worth $170,560 each.

At times, it's hard to believe that I'm paying for my four years at MSE -- but I decided to come to Hopkins because I knew that my $170,560 brain was an investment. After all, who wouldn't want to hire a $170,560 brain?

$170,560 -- that plus another $63,700 and I'd have a baseline Aston Martin V12 Vanquish. But it's alright. I don't regret the decision. With this education, I'll have an Aston Martin a couple years out -- and I'll pick whatever package comes with James Bond.

That, or I'll still be on my parents' couch.

While the whole "I-don't-know-if-I'm-going-to-get-a-job, I'm-going-to-live-in-a-cardboard-box" thing isn't exactly fun, I have loved every minute of my classes. I worked hard and made good grades. But when I asked my supervisor over the summer for career advice, her response was frightening.

"Take the GPA and the Dean's List crap off your resume. Pure waste of space." Her rationale?

"Of course you're smart. If I want to hire a nerd, I'll recruit at Harvard. Show me what you've done."

Ouch. All those hours on B-level -- well, okay, M-level -- and for what?

Don't get me wrong: I know that my Hopkins degree will make a difference. It already has. I've managed to get internships in a variety of fields without having any prior experience, largely because they knew that if I was surviving at Hopkins, I would be able to make things work anywhere.

They were right. I found that because of my broad, "useless" liberal arts degree, I did better than the other interns who were majoring in marketing or public relations or that went to journalism school. I could work under pressure, think outside the box, and pick up industry lingo quickly, thanks to all my experience skimming readings and regurgitating them on exams at Hopkins.

Unfortunately, I can't put that on my resume.

My boss had a point -- there are lots of smart kids out there. Good grades aren't enough. The days are gone when college students could flip burgers during their summers off and worry about getting a job after graduation: The job search, for our generation, began somewhere around our sophomore year of high school, when we started obsessing over our college applications.

Now, getting a job is all about real world experience: It's about internships. And that's the most frustrating part of it -- it feels like you have to have had an internship in order to get an internship.

That, or you have to know someone in a high place, or work for free.

But with $170,560 hanging over our heads, who can afford to work for free these days? I couldn't.

However, like most of my classmates, I'm driven. I'm determined. I got an internship with the Baltimore Sun this semester for credit -- and while it's a great gateway to other jobs, it's been exhausting. So exhausting, in fact, that I had to drop a class in order to keep up.

But as a result, I landed a better internship for next semester, again for credit. I was thrilled. And then I found out that in both of my majors, internship credits don't count toward graduation requirements. So I'm getting credit, but credits that I can't actually use for anything -- and consequently I'm going to have to take extra classes next semester to "make up" for the credits I'm wasting on my internship.

I'm working hard; I'm going above and beyond; I'm just trying to get a job so that I don't add to the homeless population of Charles Village. Is it too much to ask that I not be penalized for interning? What am I actually getting credit for?

Internships are a good thing for everyone. I get experience that will help me get a job; in doing so, the University's reputation grows as its students go out into the real world and demonstrate their passion for hard work.

Yet, all I seem to hear from students are nightmares and hassles about actually using their internship credits. And let's not forget the episode a year or so back with the administration considered charging students for internship credits.

I understand that classes are valuable: They're why I came to Hopkins. But in the long run, I also came to Hopkins to succeed, and it's in the school's interest that we all do so. So remove the hurdles and let internships work as hard for us as we do for them.