Summer Interns: Prepping for Real Life

By SHAWN HUBLER

July 8, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As yet another Monday presents itself, here’s a thought for the working week: Out there in the labor force, actual bosses are saying, “And when you get a sec, could you clean up after my dog?” And employees are replying: “You betcha, sir! And thanks!”

Who are these employees? Here’s a hint: They’re suspiciously young and they’re shocked that the office computers don’t have Windows 95. When the copier flashes “Toner Is Low,” they’re more likely to distinguish themselves from regular workers by stampeding out of their cubicles to respond.

Above all, they’re unsuspecting--so much so that workplace veterans like Mike Mueller have come to know them at a glance: “They’re all smiling,” joked Mueller, a recruiting executive for a large accounting firm.

They’re the summer interns, a segment of the labor force that, in a generation, has grown to encompass roughly a third of college students and a growing number of kids in high school and junior high. From law firms to union locals, from movie sets to the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, interns have become a seasonal fixture--a legion of often eager and usually cheap trainees who flood the nation’s workplaces in late June and early July seeking a career toehold in this McJob economy.

What they get is that and more--a three-month chance to educate and prove themselves, yes, but also a pass-fail course in Reality 101.

“It’s rougher than you think,” said Jeff Marquez, 22, a business major who recently had to cut short a tirade against yuppies when a friend pointed out that he could, ahem, probably pass for one in that buttoned-down shirt and crooked tie. “It’s a big realization when that time of just-get-good-grades comes to an end and it’s time to make a living.”

Marquez, who is fresh out of UCLA, once had chin-length hair, a lipstick-red Mustang and big dreams of becoming a major league baseball star. But that was, gosh, semesters ago. Now he’s a $2,500-a-month summer apprentice in the auditing division of Price Waterhouse in Los Angeles, driving a green Ford Taurus that belongs to his dad.

The car, taken alone, wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s also the matter of his hair, which had to be shorn. “When you cut it too short, it sorta ‘fros up,” Marquez said ruefully.

Kacey Nakashima, 20, is interning, too, in a college student’s dream job--the publicity department of Geffen Records on Sunset Boulevard. Crashing at an aunt’s house for the summer, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo communications major gets $25 a day, college credit, all the free CDs she can carry and an occasional glimpse of such rock stars as Slash and Beck.

The work itself has been less dazzling. She does get to sit in on weekly marketing meetings. (“There’s, like, this cool big-screen TV and the office in New York is, like, delayed seven seconds, so you talk and they don’t hear you ‘til, like, five seconds later. . . .”) But so far, her main assignment has been to stuff envelopes while listening to Geffen publicists work the phones.

“At first, I thought, ‘Oh. My. Gosh,’ ” she reported, her voice lowering ominously. “But then I talked to some other interns? And it turns out they’re, like, doing the same thing!”

Then there’s Nick Louizos, a 23-year-old idealist from Cal State L.A. who signed up for three weeks in the AFL-CIO’s new Union Summer internship, aimed at training the next generation of labor activists. His $210-a-week assignment will be to picket, leaflet and otherwise spread the gospel of organized labor. But on a recent morning--his first day on the job--his mission simply was to show up at a news conference to publicize the internship.

As he ambled to the podium before the assembled members of the media, he got his first lesson in the labor-management paradigm: “Please tell us who you are and where you’re from,” an AFL-CIO spokesman instructed him enthusiastically. At the back of the room, Louizos’ new boss could be heard muttering, “Yeah, and while you’re at it, tell us why you’re late.”

Once the purview of hustling pre-professionals and connected rich kids, the internship--a temporary stint of on-the-job training for people considering a particular career--has become a sometimes exciting, sometimes sobering, often necessary rite of passage.

Despite corporate restructurings that have shrunk some programs (openings for summer law associates, for instance, are scarcer), campus placement officials say internships have grown exponentially, in part because of a sense among students that a college degree is no longer enough to guarantee a good job.

L. Patrick Scheetz, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, said that despite three years of mild growth, the job market for recent graduates has been “unfriendly, competitive and maybe even a fraction hostile” since 1988. That has prompted students to scour the landscape for ways to improve their resumes.

Consequently, students who, a generation ago, might have waited until commencement to begin a job hunt, are thinking in detail about their prospects throughout college, and often in high school, he said.

Internships, for many, have fit the bill, despite the possibility that the work will be menial and the pay low. Even the worst offer a chance to network, sample a career and, in some cases, get college credit or extra cash. National surveys of college placement offices and large employers have found that 30% of college graduates enter the job market with one or more internships on their resumes, and about half of new hires have internship experience.

Tina Oakland, assistant director of UCLA’s Extramural Programs and Opportunities Center, said that, in fact, “It’s not unusual for students now to do a pyramid of internships, beginning perhaps with a local employer and then moving maybe to Sacramento, then something national, possibly even some international experience.” Marquez and Louizos had previous internships. Nakashima is making up for lost time: Besides Geffen Records, she is working at a Santa Monica ad agency this summer.

From the employers’ standpoint, interns--especially college interns--provide a cheap yet educated labor pool. In years past, recruiters said, internship programs were viewed with skepticism as expensive gambles that, at worst, cut into productivity by saddling regular employees with novices and kids.

But time and experience have weakened that prejudice. “More and more employers are telling us they want work experience, and that comes from internships,” said Joyce Haraughty, marketing manager for UCLA’s career center.

One recent survey, done by the authors of the Internship Bible, a directory published by the Princeton Review, found that the cost of hiring a former intern was roughly a third the cost of recruiting and training a new employee.

Companies also turn to internship programs to diversify their work force or beef up service during a summer peak in demand.

The result, campus placement officers say, has been a gradual rise in internship supply and demand.

At least three phone book-size directories are available to students, listing tens of thousands of openings, ranging from biochemical engineering to a summer driving the aforementioned Wienermobile around the United States. The National Society for Internships and Experiential Education, based in Raleigh, N.C., reported a 37% increase in the number of internships offered nationwide between 1990 and 1995.

The beneficiaries of that increase include Camrin Servio, a former high school valedictorian from South-Central Los Angeles. He is on a scholarship to Loyola Marymount University and is spending his second summer at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Servio, 19, landed the spot through a national program called Inroads, aimed at placing high-achieving minority youths. So far, internships have brought him mixed success. His first one, with a department store, nearly drove him to despair, he said. For three months, he was stuck in a corner, typing merchandise numbers into a database while office old-timers referred to him as “the new fish” and nattered on about such minutiae as how the “Cabana” model of the best-selling sofa never seemed to move in the Crenshaw store.

Enterprise, Servio said, restored his faith as an intern. “I’m learning accounting, marketing, service, sales,” he said. He is so happy he doesn’t even mind the occasional downsides of his current summer gig, which on a recent morning included renting a Nissan to a woman who haggled over the damage waiver for 20 minutes while blowing cigarette smoke in Servio’s face.

“The program prepares them for the real world, not only in skills but just in the realities of life,” said Ira Robb, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise in Los Angeles. “Many of these kids return after graduation and stay with us long-term.”

So popular is the internship as an entree into the working world, in fact, that federally funded summer jobs programs have adopted its framework and lexicon. Dianne Russell, career center manager for the Foothill Private Industry Council in Pasadena, said that this year she expects to place more than 1,000 low-income students ages 14 to 24 in “internships” that augment the council’s standard summer jobs with career counseling classes.

Minh Luu, a 20-year-old psychology major at Cal State Northridge, is spending his fourth summer as an intern at the Boys and Girls Club of Pasadena, a position that has helped shape his ambition to become a child psychologist.

Ron Friscia, the club’s branch manager and Luu’s boss, said Luu started out as a summer supervisor of the club’s teenage Sunday Bingo crew and now is “my right-hand man.” What that meant, on a recent morning, was rising above the chaos of the first day of summer activities, as wild swarms of children, some with pink lipstick goodbye kisses still on their cheeks, shrieked and clattered into the building to sign up for day care and recreation programs.

Luu’s main assignment was to teach a summer science class, but first, there were a thousand tiny crises to sort out.

“ ‘Scuse me. You know that little ball? The Foosball? I need it and it’s stuck.”

“ ‘Scuse me. Can I play pool?”

“Can you gimme a stick? A pool stick?”

“We need a stick.”

“A pool stick.”

“HEY! HEY!! We need two sticks!”

“Two!”

“The Foosball is stuck!”

In his office, Friscia the manager watched with pride as Luu calmly negotiated his way through the howling, fidgeting little mob. The kid was a natural-born manager.

“I can see him someday running a Boys and Girls Club of his own,” Friscia said, “or something bigger than that.”

In business, as in the social services, employers vie for capable, quick studies like Luu. Accounting and law firms use internships to get dibs on a university’s top-ranking graduates.

Consequently, people such as Chris Strauss and Howard Caro--high achievers at prestigious schools--find themselves in big demand and tend to spend summers in style.

Strauss, 27, a graduate student who is getting his MBA from Indiana University--one of the nation’s top business schools--is spending his 12-week internship in the South Bay, helping to develop male action figures for Mattel.

“Last Friday,” he said, “I sat in the office playing G.I. Joes and taking notes. It was great. Just like Tom Hanks in ‘Big.’ ”

Meanwhile, Caro--a 24-year-old summer associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher--says his last few weeks have been a whirl of dinner parties, mountain weekends and winery tours. So far, the Columbia University law student said he has worked late only once, and that was when he took a break to attend a “Mission: Impossible” premiere.

Back in New York, he says, his law school classmates who refused to untether themselves from Manhattan regale him with the kinds of horror stories that are the stock in trade of the crowded East Coast legal establishment.

“Partners screaming, ‘You’re incompetent, we don’t want you around here, what kind of idiot stuff is this that you’re bringing me,’ that sort of thing,” Caro said, smiling. “Nothing like that has happened to me yet.”

The intern experience does, however, have its downsides. For one thing, the pay often amounts to minimum wage or mere college credit. As the bottom feeders on the corporate food chain, interns are often among the first to be cut when a company re-engineers. And unless their bosses are conscientious about educating them, interns are ripe for exploitation--or almost worse, neglect.

Cartoonist Scott Adams, who lampoons corporate culture in his “Dilbert” comic strip, says he gets “an unusually high percentage” of his e-mail from summer interns, who typically have signed onto the Internet from their office computers on company time because they don’t have enough to do.

Adams says their stories have inspired his cartoon depiction of interns as hapless victims of “spank-the-intern” office fund-raisers who are punished for good ideas by being flung into the cosmos on an office “intern-a-pult.”

And Dilbert doesn’t even begin to address the entertainment industry, where tales of intern abuse are commonplace. One entertainment executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the job description for an internship at a local studio included filling the office cookie jar twice a day. Another producer, she said, routinely had interns fetch bagels.

“I know people who have their interns, literally, pick up dog poop,” she said, adding that the assignment did make one valuable point. For a budding entertainment exec, she said, it’s never too early to learn that “this is not a nice business.”

Ah, but who could bear to teach such a lesson to Allyson Barth, just turning 21 and exploring Hollywood for the first time? This year, she was among 28 winners of one of the nation’s most coveted internships, a summer-long program run by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Since the age of 6, Barth said, she has dreamed of a career in Tinseltown--not such a stretch for, say, a local kid, but a pretty tall order for a steamfitter’s daughter from Cumberland, Md. Until she saw the poster for the academy’s internship on a wall at Syracuse University, she figured she’d have to content herself with her hometown theater, where she did everything from acting to sewing seat cushions.

When she learned her videotaped application had been chosen from among 1,019 entries, she said, she ran all the way home, shouting, “I’m going to Los Angeles!” Now she’s living in a Brentwood sublet, “the first member of the family to leave Cumberland in, like, five generations,” and she spends her days in a Century City high-rise at Davis Entertainment Television.

On a recent morning--after an evening spent plowing through a 20-pound box of scripts--she got a lesson in the art of the pitch. Then she went through Publishers Weekly in search of books that might be adapted to TV. (Her instincts were solid; her first choice was a gossip columnist’s roman a clef, with three words in the title, one of which was “sex.”) Then she was told to Xerox a big map and highlight every city that had an observatory; the company was in pre-production on a miniseries titled “Asteroids,” and the script called for big telescopes.

It’s a far cry from her last summer job, as a secretary in the state highway office back home. But, like all good internships, it has offered that most valuable of life experiences--an epiphany.

“I was at a stoplight on Olympic Boulevard the other day,” Barth recalled, “and there were all these palm trees up to heaven. And I thought, ‘My God, I’m really doing this. Everything in my life has pointed in this direction.

“Finally, I’m on my own.’ ”

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An Intern Sampler

* Actress Jodie Foster (Esquire magazine)

* Humorist Dave Barry (Congressional Quarterly)

* Broadcast journalist Bill Moyers (interned for then-Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson)

* MTV reporter Tabitha Soren (CNN, MTV, ABC and NBC)

* Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (interned during high school as a congressional page)

* Director Spike Lee (interned at Columbia Pictures between college and film school)

* President Bill Clinton (interned for Sen. J. William Fulbright)

* Vice President Al Gore (New York Times)

* Sen. Dianne Feinstein (interned with the Coro Foundation)