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<p>Internships do not have to be paid. Internships can be paid or unpaid. Go here for a good explanation of when interns can be unpaid and when they must be paid: [HR</a> Forum: Unpaid interns and the FLSA, what you need to know before hiring summer help](<a href=“http://gneil.blogspot.com/2009/05/unpaid-interns-and-flsa-what-you-need.html]HR”>HR Forum: Unpaid interns and the FLSA, what you need to know before hiring summer help)</p>
<p>In summary, interns can be unpaid if they’re training for their own benefit and are not working for the benefit of the company. In the context of the entertainment industry: if an unpaid intern worked at Saturday Night Live, and his job was to follow around and assist a writer (under close supervision), that would be fine. What an unpaid intern couldn’t do is actually write a skit for the show.</p>
<p>In engineering: let’s say you want to size a pump. An engineer can sit down with an unpaid intern, explain how you size a pump, can show the equations, and can work through the equations with the unpaid intern. An engineer cannot hand an intern a textbook and tell him to go size a pump.</p>
<p>In entertainment, having a “go-fer” that brings you coffee and picks up your mail is valuable to the company and meeting people and networking is valuable to the intern, so the unpaid internship system works. In engineering, companies want the intern to actually do value added work, and the intern actually want to do value added work, so the unpaid internship system usually doesn’t work.</p>
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<p>I’ve been hearing this “lack of internship” excuse from a lot of people in Gainesville. To me, the quality of the career services department is incredibly important in choosing a college, and it sounds like UF is doing a terrible job creating opportunities. I’ve been telling people this year to avoid UF for that reason.</p>