NEW YORK—New York University student Dave Werner announced Monday that he has successfully parlayed an unpaid fall internship at the magazine GQ into a long-sought-after unpaid winter internship at the ESPN network. “After three months spent fetching coffee and making copies, all my hard work has finally paid off,” the 21-year-old communications major said as he dropped off executive assistant Matt Sullivan’s dry cleaning at a local laundromat. “These days, I’m totally in charge of taking lunch orders, and some of the people I work with already sort of know my name. What an invaluable experience.” Werner added that his main goal is to use his connections at ESPN to secure a highly desirable spring internship that could possibly offer school credit and a modest travel stipend.
92% of our internships are paid (I checked, that’s a real number) so we don’t have many unpaid interns like the one above. But we know a company who does, who also has an office staffed by nothing but unpaid interns. And whose director is absolutely in love with the idea of students paying to do unpaid internship after unpaid internship, after unpaid internship. We don’t really think that’s cool.
So it’s funny because it’s true.
This has been the toughest fall ever for our industry. September was kind of ok, but October and November were savage. Thankfully now everything is golden and it’s only going to get better next year:
After one of the worst contractions since 1982, the B.C. economy is forecast to rebound as one of the fastest growing in Canada next year, according to RBC Economics’ provincial outlook report.
Following a 2.6% decline this year, real GDP in B.C. is expected to rise 3.2%, the second fastest rate after Saskatchewan (3.9%).
Vancouver’s hosting of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in February and March is expected to be a boon for B.C.’s tourism sector, which should translate into higher employment and retail spending in the first quarter of 2010.
For the year, RBC projects retail spending to rise 5.7% to $56.3 billion, recovering close to 2008 levels after an estimated 5.8% decline in 2009.
That picture up there is my.vancouverinternships.ca – it’s a new site we’re putting together for the participants in our working holiday / casual work experience programs. It will give them resume writing tips, interviewing tips, a Vancouver Guide, job links, and most importantly – jobs sourced by VancouverInternships staff exclusively for them.
Sourcing jobs is important for a number of reasons. The main one being that international students face a huge obstacle when getting jobs in Vancouver – it’s not just the language – but it’s the visa. A lot of employers are afraid to deal with foreign workers, or don’t understand how their visas work – for one thing, they don’t know if students are allowed to work with any company they want. Before we source any jobs, we take the time to explain these visas to employers and make them feel comfortable with them. So what you’re seeing on the site are employers who are interested in hosting international students, and are ok with their visas and with any reporting rules schools may have.
Anyhow, the site’s in Beta right now, we’re testing it with a few students – gratis – in order to work out the bugs, but starting in April of 2010, it will roll out for all participants.
