It’s officially career season, and the race to secure a summer internship or co-op for this upcoming semester is on.

Students in skirt-suits and collared shirts can be seen roaming campus at all hours of the day; the clack of heels on pavement can be heard from a mile away. Stress levels are especially high during this time of year.

The war between S.T.E.M. majors and everyone else is upon us. There is so much pressure put on students during this time, and some either don’t get an internship or they get an unpaid internship.

This begs the obvious question – why is there so much pressure on students to get internships only one or two years into their college experience? No college at Iowa State pushes for internships quite as hard as the College of Engineering, but the pressure is certainly there for almost every major. Is it even worth it?

I believe the answer is yes. Gaining experience in your field before applying for a full-time job exposes you to what working in your industry is actually like. It makes you more hirable, more confident and more knowledgeable as a student. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeling some pressure to get an internship in the summers of your college years – with one exception. It is completely unacceptable to expect students to intern for an entire summer without pay.

For a lot of college students, summer is the time to save up money for the school year and paying for college. Without those three months of work, many students might not be able to even afford college. Internships are incredibly valuable experiences, but not if they come at the cost of half a semester’s worth of tuition. To expect students to be able to work for free is simply unrealistic and favors the wealthy and privileged.

To make matters worse, most unpaid internships are geared towards students in lower-paying majors to begin with, such as education or the social sciences. Being an engineering major, I realize that not all work is created equal, but I can’t imagine being able to spend a whole summer in that position. The less time in the summer students get to earn money for the upcoming school year, the more debt they will have to pay off after graduating. 

So yes, Iowa State and other academic cultures should continue pushing for their students to get internships as quickly as they can. Having work experience prior to your first full-time job is invaluable to your personal growth and your career trajectory. But let’s end the expectation that students should be able to spend their whole summer working in an unpaid internship. It’s unrealistic, arrogant and it needs to change.