multitude

Internshi*

‘Did he get enough of pay­ing you already?’ she struck me cyn­i­cally, as she always did.

Like the time when I received a Christ­mas present from the office where I spent my sum­mer intern­ship. Con­tem­plat­ing it under the tree for a few days before Christ­mas’ Eve already filled me with sat­is­fac­tion as a sym­bol of my undoubt­edly fun­da­men­tal con­tri­bu­tion to the work of the office for that year. Unwrap­ping it, I had a rush of joy: it was a note­book by the well-known brand! My excite­ment quickly sub­sided when I noticed my mum was shak­ing her head in dis­ap­proval. Her words that time were less sar­cas­tic and, maybe because of the fes­tive atmos­phere, acquired a morally solemn tone: ‘They should be ashamed.’

Later I did the maths and, as it turned out, my mother was right. Assum­ing that, because of my poor pro­fes­sional skills, I got paid just half the hourly wage of a newly grad­u­ate (those days they used to be paid), for my 225 hours of work I should have earned some­thing around 1000 euro. I felt ashamed too but, back then, my favourite cur­rency was ECTS. So was called the sys­tem of cred­its in use all over Europe to stan­dard­ize the amount of time nec­es­sary to suc­cess­fully com­plete any aca­d­e­mic career. Courses, lec­tures, work­shops, study trips and also intern­ships were pack­aged in cred­its each worth 25 hours of study or work.

The 9 cred­its earned through my intern­ship looked like a great reward at the end of the sac­ri­ficed sum­mer, as they allowed me to leave for Eras­mus with the near cer­tainty of being able to get my bach­e­lor degree by the end of the aca­d­e­mic year. After just three months, I was hold­ing in my hands a (prob­a­bly recy­cled) present worth 1% of the value of the work I had done: it didn’t look so great anymore.

This is when I resolved to never work for free again, at least for money mak­ing businesses.