I have recently been consulted on my internship ‘expertise’ by the organisation I am working for. Having done several internship programmes in my bid to further my career, I unwittingly found myself being able to give advice on the one area of expertise I had built up – ‘being an intern’.
Archive for the 'charity' Category
Sign of the times: intern advisor
Published 07/17/2010 charity Leave a CommentTags: advising on internships, international development, expertise
It’s not what you know…
Published 07/12/2010 Nepotism , charity Leave a CommentTags: meritocracy, third sector, who you know
Here everyone is mostly concerned about interns having to work for free. Well, frankly, I don’t mind it at all. Not that my financial situation is amazing- it is actually rather awful. I just think when there is a will, there is a way – one can always work evenings and weekends to pay the bills. Working 2 jobs is, of course, never easy, but the experience you get from the internship is worth it.
I don’t mind that interns have to spend quite a share of their time on administrative duties. No one gets fancy degrees thinking they will be printing out hand outs or staffing envelopes, but it is the rule of the game and you’ve got to learn to respect it and try to get something positive from it.
What I do mind though is something that I don’t see discussed too often in the Media – the tremendous role of “glass ceiling” involved in securing the internship…
The Music Business
Published 06/04/2010 Arts , Education , Fundraising , Music , charity Leave a CommentTags: internships in charity, music interns, orchestra internships
In mid-April we caught up with a former intern at a national orchestra who has managed to land a job with the same company he interned for. This is what he had to say about his experiences in the education and fundraising departments.
Q: Where are you working now?
A: I’m working for an Orchestra.
Q: And what do you do?
A: I work in the education department.
Q: Brilliant, how did you get that job?
A: I started off as an intern in the fundraising department. And I soon realised that I didn’t want to do fundraising so I asked to help out in music education whilst I was doing my internship. Then a part-time role came up. So when I finished my internship I started doing that and I never left.
Internships in Conservation
Published 02/07/2010 charity 3 CommentsTags: conservation internships, environment internships, internships in conservation
Interns Anonymous catches five minutes with another ex-intern in our continuing series of interviews. This time, we explore internships in conservation.
Interns Anonymous: You interned in the third sector. Tell me a little about it:
********: Well I was at a conservation charity for three months, and it was called an internship. It was basically an admin position.
Interns Anonymous: What did you do?
********: Filing, archiving files, moving them from paper to a computer and… that’s about it.
Interns Anonymous: What hours did you work?
********: 9 to 5, part-time, for three months.
Interns Anonymous: Did you feel like you got much out of this experience?
********: Well, I learned how to do admin. I know how to do work. I didn’t gain any skills, or qualifications which would help me get paid work in conservation.
Interns Anonymous: Was it sold to you as experience that would lead onto a paid position?
********: Definitely. Yes. That’s what they said. It will be valuable experience for charity or conservation work.
Intern Interview #1
Published 11/11/2009 Interviews , Jobs , charity Leave a CommentTags: internships, interview
We are unleashing a new feature on the website: the Interns Anonymous interview. Armed with a dictaphone and 10 minutes of spare time, we are interviewing past and present interns about their internship experiences. We kick off with an ex-headhunter who wanted a career-change in her mid-twenties. She turned to internships to get into the charity sector.
IA: Where does this story start?
I chose to have a career change earlier this year. I was advised that the best way to get into other organisations – having worked for four years but with no actual qualification to show for it – was to do internships…I was in a unique position because being an headhunter, they were all with my clients.
IA: So they weren’t advertised?
No, none of them were advertised, I just knew somebody there and I normally worked with the person I knew, in their team
Time out: Interim interning
Published 09/27/2009 charity Leave a CommentTags: Guardian, interns, internships
The Guardian profiles a women called Anneka Dawson, a 25-year-old student at the University of Sussex who is halfway through a three-year PhD on child development, funded by the Economic and Society Research Council (ESRC).
She has just returned to her studies, following a three-month internship with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), which she believes will stand her career prospects in good stead. “In future, I would really like to work with a children’s charity,” she explains. “So this was really good for me. I gained insider knowledge about how the voluntary sector works and I got help and advice on how to join a voluntary organisation. I met a lot of people, both inside the organisation and at conferences, and having that experience on the CV is really good, because this sector is now really competitive, even for volunteering, so it’s good to have something to make you stand out and show how dedicated and enthusiastic you are.”
The internship was funded by her existing funder, the ESRC, and Dawson has been able to add a three-month extension to the end of her PhD funding, so she hasn’t had to lose any time from her studies. During the internship Dawson moved from her home in Brighton to live with her parents, within easy commuting distance of London. The ESRC paid her travel costs and would have paid accommodation costs, had that been necessary.
“It was a very different environment and I needed to learn a lot quickly, but that was a good challenge,” she says.
All right if you can get the funding.
Valuable but difficult: living on the biscuit collection
Published 08/06/2009 Westminster , charity 1 CommentI have found interning to be an extremely valuable, but difficult experience for someone of my background. I live near Reading, at home with my mother who is a disabled single parent living in social housing and my younger sister who is in her first year at university. I am currently the only person in my household who is able to earn properly. I am one of the unfortunate few whose parents are not in a position to support them while they intern. In fact, I have to help my mother pay her rent and buy food because she can’t afford it, and help out my sister with money for books and equipment. The concept of interning is alien to my family- they can’t understand why, with five A’s at A-level and a strong degree from a top university, I have to work for free. It is increasingly frustrating and demoralising for me to keep justifying it to them when we lack basic necessary household items such as a washing machine and a cooker.
Continue reading ‘Valuable but difficult: living on the biscuit collection’
It is hard to know how to distinguish between pre-existing existential dilemmas and those induced by doing an internship. Almost everyday of my fairly useful and fair internship I would question WHY AM I HERE? WHAT AM I DOING? And possibly when will I earn some goddam money?
