End the intern-minable summer daze

Unpaid internships are, by their very nature, unfair. Students who know about opportunities and can afford to take advantage of them can gain valuable experience, while their classmates who don’t know where to look or need to make money over the summer cannot. Through the Center for Career Education and the Office of Government and Community Affairs, Columbia supposedly works to extend these opportunities to a broader population by providing information and financial aid. However, the complexity of and lack of communication surrounding these processes prevent them from actually working for students.
Offerings such as the Congressional Internship Program, the (CU In) California Program, and Columbia Experience Overseas provide access to a variety of internships. However, these programs can be misleading, since they actually exist more to inform students of opportunities than to act as routes to individual internships. Applying to a Columbia program does not necessarily equate to applying for an internship, but this is not always made clear to applicants at the beginning of the process. Even more problematic, though, is how poorly these programs follow up with students after they have applied to specific internships.
Unpaid internships offer students experience in exchange for work. They do not provide monetary compensation, and they certainly do not provide housing—many, in fact, expect students to set up living arrangements for themselves with no help whatsoever. Some employers require students to have housing secured or, at the very least, tentatively arranged before they will accept them. Yet, while such employers force students to attest to their financial security before offering a position, Columbia programs will not give students financial aid until they have been officially accepted by the employer. Thus continues the self-selecting bias of unpaid internships.
If Columbia truly wants its students to be able to take advantage of all the summer opportunities that are available, and if it is going to have offices dedicated to doing just that, basic communication and logistical improvements are necessary. Internship-oriented offices should clearly articulate their missions from the beginning, yes, but the follow-up is infinitely more important. Emails advertising exciting opportunities in California or Washington, D.C. are certainly laudable—but they mean very little if campus offices do not help to provide the housing and money necessary for everyone to be able to take advantage of these opportunities.