Jumpstarting a career

Alissa Quart - The Boston Globe: "Once, not so long ago, internships involved little work. They were a sleepy summertime rite of passage, the first recognition of what your dad's connections would ultimately enable you to achieve, combined with an excellent way to waste time. They were not really about learning and achievement.

No longer. Today, internships are demanding, substantive, and competitive. ''I tell the kids, be real choosy and go for the name brand internship -- GE, EMC, one of the big four accounting firms," says Jeff Silver, associate director of career services at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. ''NBC, ABC, the PR firm Arnold Worldwide. It's the blockbuster company on your resume that an employer will recognize."

Nowadays, most kids do or attempt to do just that, as familiar with these shiny corporate acronyms as their own last names. A National Association of Colleges and Employers survey found that among the hires from the college class of 2004, three in five had had an internship (code word for free labor) while 32.3 percent had ''co-op experience" (code word for cheap labor). It was a very different picture 20 years ago: According to the manual ''Peterson's Internships 2005," in the early 1980s only one in 36 students completed an internship or any other learning program.

Today, the competition to land the best internships is intense, as is the work conducted by the interns who obtain them. No longer do internships fit the cliche of a student waiting a whole summer to offer ''the youth perspective" at one meeting.

''One girl wrote three press releases on her first day," says Chris Russell, associate director of marketing and recruiting of students for the Study Abroad at Boston University. ''Another went to L.A. during pilot season. It was second semester senior year. He did his internship and then he went back to L.A. eight weeks later. He was happy to see he was still in people's memories, and he was ready to hook [make connections]. From the internship, he had a distinct advantage and a full Rolodex. The students are very focused and directed and want to get their resumes up and running ahead of the pack."

Internships are part of a larger shift in the shaping of American youth: today, childhood is more structured and labor-intensive, laden with classes, tests, training, and intensive SAT preps. The evolution of the internship is of a piece with the hyperorganized, credentialed way of youth. Just as you need to go to the right kindergarten and get into the right -- no, perfect -- college, you now have to have an internship.

The notion of meritocracy in this structured, ambitious equation is a key component but a flawed one. We know that early education and SAT tutoring avails itself most easily to those who can afford it -- and the same can be true for internships. Therein lies a problem. A world that requires one or two summers of free or cheap labor from a college student is far from a meritocratic arena. But what young person can work for free or cheap?

That person is a student with some money. No institution better dramatizes this than University of Dreams, a summer internship program that has placed 800 students in five years in a mouth-watering array of glamour-brand companies -- Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, New Line, and Fox to name a few. The University of Dreams arranges housing and transportation for the students. But the dream doesn't come cheaply: Students (or their parents) must pay $5,999 to $6,799 a summer. In other words, they are paying for their internships.

The paradox, though, is that in today's labor market, an internship might be worth that much. In the age of the quality internship as necessity, employers and colleges need to undertake greater efforts to find and fund students who cannot afford to intern. These days, what-I-did-over-my-summer-vacation has never been so important. Interns of yesteryear wouldn't believe their eyes. Unless, of course, the University of Dreams-ers were their own kids.

Alissa Quart is the author of ''Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.""