firecat

I friend of mine graduated quite some time ago and worked a long series of unpaid internships. By long series, I mean, many, many, many years. None had any opportunity to turn into a paid position. Eventually, she started getting paying positions, but by "paying," they required extremely extended hours and didn't pay anywhere even remotely near a living wage. She eventually went back to school for a Masters, hoping that would make a difference, and for quite a while it didn't seem to at all, and most of the positions available to her were still unpaid internships. She's finally gotten a paying position that pays something like a reasonable-but-not-great wage. It's taken her... maybe ten or twelve years to get to that point. It's been really depressing to see. She does come from a privileged background, and has been (and still is) living with her parents to facilitate a lot of this. She also has a mountain of debt, including student loans that are more or less never going to be repaid the way things are going at the moment, but also including just creative uses of credit cards and such when she would have to do things like pay for transit or gas or car repairs (or a car) to get to and from jobs that didn't pay anything. I get that she's in an industry that's worse for this than others, but still, it was pretty alarming to see, especially for someone like me, who basically walked out of school and into a decently-paying job.