For the last fortnight, I’ve been doing an internship at The Spectator. And having seen
the furore over Nick Clegg’s announcement today, I thought I’d give CoffeeHousers my take.
Until I was 22, I’d never heard of internships: no one at my school (Aylwin Girls’ School in Bermondsey) went on them. Most of us left school at sixteen, and the jobs we were aiming for were admin, hairdressing, childcare — or, in some cases, motherhood (and welfare).
The idea of pupils spending summers doing internships to beef up their CVs was alien to me. If you wanted to work at the head office of a high street bank — which was my first job — then you just applied to a recruitment agency. It was when I was offered a (paid) internship in a fashion PR agency, after doing two weeks unpaid work experience during my annual leave from the bank, that I was introduced to this world.
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