Jazzy Jeff: Unpaid internships or boozy holidays?

As a student, there were many bullets I am grateful to have dodged. Not getting a credit card, not catching an STD, not studying maths. However, of all the potential […]


As a student, there were many bullets I am grateful to have dodged. Not getting a credit card, not catching an STD, not studying maths. However, of all the potential pitfalls, the one I’m most thankful to have avoided is never having wasted one of my summer holidays doing an internship; rotting away in some stuffy office, acting chai wallah to a jumped-up social media strategist in a polyester suit. The summer holidays are for steamy romances and boozy holidays on the Med. I can categorically state that if CV improvement is the first thing the glorious sunshine and drawn out evenings bring to mind, you are dull.

However, much as I chafe against internships, I fully understand the need to acquire some type of work-experience if you ever hope to be promoted beyond Toilet Cleaner’s Deputy Assistant. Having been far too busy contemplating the bottom of a pint glass, I never bothered with that malarkey as an undergrad.

Now I find myself frantically cold-calling toilet cleaning agencies, inquiring if they have any unpaid voluntary opportunities in order to gain real world experience in a sector I hope to pursue a career in, and I’d be more than happy to cover all expenses incurred. But apparently I don’t have the requisite experience. It would seem people won’t even let me pay to clean their shit. If you don’t want to end up like Jazzy, internships, paid or otherwise, are a necessary evil.

Much more than internships themselves, what really gets my goat are those toe-curlingly earnest students who constantly moan about unpaid work experience. Here we have a student body so woefully apathetic they probably think the concept of democracy was dreamt up by an ingenious media exec to facilitate reality TV, and they’d really rather like to vote for BoJo, but unfortunately he hasn’t got round to appearing on I’m a Celebrity… yet.

Yet even the faintest whisper of unpaid internships and those same students start frothing like a Trotskyite at a trade union conference, before bludgeoning you with a rolled up copy of the Guardian and screaming about the unfairness of it all, the cost of living in London and some guff about the 1% who can rely on Daddy’s connections and, more crucially, wallet. It’s the type of self-interested hypocrisy that sees people heartily agreeing with the ‘women and children first’ rule, right up until the ship hits the iceberg, when they’ll stampede towards the life-raft, pushing doe-eyed toddlers overboard to get to the front of the queue.

What’s more, I resent the allegation that you somehow have to rely on family connections and wealth in order to find and fund an internship. This attitude is solely based on the assumption that London is the only fucking place in the world sophisticated enough to have an office in it. You are wrong, I can almost guarantee you that your nearest city does have an office in it. Who knows, there might even be companies based in that office, with real world employees working inside, doing whatever skull-numbingly dull stuff people do in offices. All you have to do is call them and see if they’ll have you, then you can catch the bus to the office, make some cups of tea, and add that all-consuming line to your CV. And most importantly, you can stop moaning.

Now, before I burst a blood-vessel, I better get back to practising cleaning the house loo; they won’t be happy if I don’t know what I’m doing when I start my internship…