Students are trading money for experience this summer, as they search for summer internships. Josh Borris, a senior in high school, is taking a second summer without pay to gain experience at an internship he hopes will give him the upper hand in the applicant pool later on in life.
Borris will be working as an intern at Correct Rx Pharmacy Services,Inc. in Maryland. Despite the lack of pay, he believes that the experience he will acquire from the opportunity will be his repayment.
"I want to one day be a pharmacist researcher figuring out how drugs interact with the human body," the high school student told the Kansas City Star of his summer internship. "The internship is an experience for the future."
Riley Drake, a senior at the Friends School of Baltimore, works without salary at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She speaks of her experience to the Kansas City Star stating, "I was excited to just be a lab monkey, but I ended up getting to work on my own project. This is valuable because not only am I finding something no one has found before, but I'm learning interpersonal skills, lab skills, and how to interact with people older than I am."
Although many young people are willing to give up pay for a leg up in their future career, others would rather not work at all. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, amongst those between ages 16 and 19, only approximately one million of the 11 million youth who did not have jobs or were not looking for jobs last year, wanted one. The remaining ten million are said to not have wanted to work.
For those who are interested in working, the BLS predicted that more teens will find summer jobs this summer than they did last summer.
