There has been a growing ethical trend within every undergraduate’s career.

The importance of internships has become exponentially greater as every undergrad moves closer to graduation.

Now, in college, it seems like obtaining an internship is just as important as obtaining the Bachelor’s degree. If your résumé is void of an internship then everyone seems to wonder what you have been doing for the past four years. You know, besides completing 90 plus hours in four years. Whatever.

For undergrads, those ever-important internships are widely unpaid. Let’s be honest, internships are unpaid 9.5 times out of ten.

Though your internship is unpaid, you are still expected to treat the internship as your first professional job. Regardless if the internship counts towards class credit, your internship supervisor/boss expects you to be professional.

That’s fine and all, but there is still that nagging issue of you not getting paid for your work. Typically, interns progress from doing grunt work such as data entry to more interesting projects. But even though you gain more responsibilities, you still are not getting paid.

Sometimes you are forced to wonder if all this experience is not just a waste of time.

Truthfully, unpaid internships are glorified volunteer work. You should know that now.

More often than not, you are assigned tasks that your boss would have to do. Your boss should write all those blogs and enter all that data. If your boss and/or supervisor did that work, they would get paid for their effort and services.

That is a hard realization.

For the organization or company where you intern, the work you do is essential. They need someone to do it.

For undergrads, there are two truths that have yet to be reconciled. Internships have become essentially required for most post-graduate plans yet a lot of students simply cannot afford to be interns.

Some students need a sustainable income because of their financial situation. Especially at a private institution, more and more students need some kind of part-time job. They cannot afford to be interns. As much as they would want to intern for a publishing house or state representative, they need their jobs.

For those students, their résumés will probably placed at the bottom of the pile because they do not have internship experience.

Really a student could work in eight different internships during their entire undergraduate career. The student worked eight semesters of unpaid without the guarantee of job at the end. It seemed like an internship always guaranteed a job. That salaried light at the end of the plebian tunnel, if you will.

Now, that is not necessarily true. Sure, you could walk away with a stellar letter of recommendation. However, that recommendation will pay back the loans you took out so you could do unpaid work for an entire semester or year.

Imagine the frustrating conundrum some students must feel when they found that diamond internship. The internship is stellar. Then they scroll past requirements to see that the internship is unpaid.

Or imagine the student has been a dedicated intern for an extended period of time. They have no guarantee of a job yet they are expected to remain loyal and professional to an unpaid position.

They have to decide that their services deserve a paycheck at some point. Yet that is an incredibly awkward position. With no guarantee of a job, they have to start at the bottom of another organization.

Unpaid internships are at the bottom of the murkiest swamp.