cman8123

So i just got offered and accepted this internship/job this summer

Welcome to Student Edge Painting: Washington and Oregon

its one of those college painting businesses that teaches you how to run your own painting business in your home town. I think that it is a SUPER rare and VERY HELPFUL opportunity to be able to actually run your own business after your freshman year in college (Im a frosh at washington). do you guys think its all cracked up to be?

and yes, the potential earnings are there. a guy in my fraternity made $23,000 each of the last two summers while running $70,000 business each summer. he can now put on his resume that he ran $150,000 business during summer while his first two years in college--is that not more valuable than any class you can ever take????

im pretty stoked to start training and everything.

what're your thoughts???

egolikestomach

a friend of mine does this and while he's successful he doesn't really make bank like you're saying. it's not a rare opportunity and in a lot of places there's a LOT of competition from people running very similar operations--in my hometown alone there were three variations on "college pro painters."

cman8123

bumpppppppp???

Experiment8

I declined the invitation to the second interview once I found out what this "internship" was all about... seemed like a fluffed up pyramid scheme to me.

collegeboss

yeah its a ponzi scheme btw

you_of_eh

a ponzi scheme aha

flushmaverick

At UCSB, they have people go into the lecture halls and talk about this internship that's supposedly "high-ranked" by the Princeton Review (while simply calling it a "management internship"), hand out papers for people to put their contact information on, and then the people running it call up those people and try to rate them as prospects before having an in-person interview.

That's when they tell you that it's about running your own painting company. When I got that far, I thought, "Wow, this is definitely not something I'm going to do." My interviewer kept talking about his aspirations to own a ski resort or something like that, while the other interviewee kept trying to seem really interested (probably because the interviewer kept mentioning how "exclusive" the program is, along with how much the "average" intern made). I elected to not go through another round of interviewing.

Though I understand people can produce works of different qualities, it didn't take me long to find out that "CollegeWorks Painting" or whatever it was called tended to produce a significant enough of "interns" whose companies couldn't actually paint a house well. It sort of struck me as being disrespectful to the trade, as weird as that sounds.

lividcougar

Stay away from them. Its a huge scam and you will end up owing them money in the end!

chuy

It's a pretty well known scam.

ThomasWWU

I have actually worked with Student Edge Painting now for 3 years and first of all, a ponzi or pyramid scheme requires an individual to pay an "investment" up front. I can not speak for other student painting companies but Student Edge does not take any money up front.

People will make different amounts of money doing this, but you will get out what you put in. Unfortunately some people just don't/can't put in the effort necessary. For me and many others that I know, this opportunity has provided insight into what it is actually like to run a small business while in school without assume all the liability you would have starting something from the ground up.

If you are considering doing something like this over the summer, i encourage you to ask the Student Edge representatives to give you phone numbers of past employees so that you can sit down and pick their brains.

All the best,

- Thomas

jamie4444

Unlike traditional Student Painting models, Student Edge Painting actually guarantees their interns a wage. This certainly helps it's image which unfortunately gets dragged down by other student painting models. This company cares about its people and works hard to do right in the industry.

stradmom

It's not a real internship.

shoot4moon

I vote for Thomas's idea, but be aware that so many people say it is a scam. There are a lot of threads here about it.