Students within the College of Arts & Sciences are grateful for unpaid internship
Within the College of Arts & Sciences, Harvey Ballard, associate professor, created an internship program easily accessible to students with majors or minors within the department of environmental and plant biology.
“We have one B.S. degree for students interested in graduate school and we have two majors that are career track oriented,” Ballard said.
“They’re never going to be competitive necessarily if we don’t give them internships of some sort.”
Ballard reached out to various organizations, even those without internships, and asked if any would be willing to set aside an internship type position for Ohio University students. Out of the 20 he contacted, all replied, he said.
“A lot of organizations worthy of having internship programs can’t afford to pay people,” he said.
Although most of the internships Ballard found were unpaid, many offered within the department and outside Athens offer incentives — such as free or relatively cheap housing.
For example, an internship at the U.S. National Arboretum provides interns with a $4,000 scholarship to cover the cost of living.
Of the 22 internships directly associated with the department, only four do not include some type of compensation or incentive.
“I’ve been encouraging students to build in their minds that they’re going to do an internship their sophomore or junior year — maybe both, and that at least one of them is going to be unpaid,” Ballard said. “But the benefit of doing the internship will outweigh the disadvantage.”
To make the application process easier for students, Ballard developed a standardized application and waiver as another incentive for students to be more willing to apply to internships.
“I totally encourage departments to think about what their students need and for somebody to take ownership of it and to even set up a few (internships) for students that would benefit,” Ballard said. “It makes a huge difference to the students.”
Similarly, the department of psychology within the College of Arts & Sciences encourages students to pursue fieldwork experience, Susan Tice-Alicke, assistant chair for undergraduate studies in psychology, said.
Most of the internships sought out by students are typically unpaid, but the experience received gives students a different perspective, she said.
“(Fieldwork) is not words in a textbook,” she said. “That person is in front of them. That can be life changing. It could be that the students look at that situation and say, ‘Yes, that is exactly what I want to do,’ or they might look at that and say, ‘Woah, that’s not what I want to do,’ and that’s important.”
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