Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison must strike a difficult balance between building the perfect resume to achieve their postgrad goals while also focusing on the classes and college experience in front of them.
College students like UW-Madison junior Abby Madonia say they feel pressured to pursue work experience, while also juggling coursework, part-time jobs and a balanced social life. This pressure is beginning to take its toll.
Madonia told The Daily Cardinal she dedicates 40 hours a week to her two internships — time that’s necessary for not just for her future career, but to afford to live as a student right now.
“Even with my tuition covered, I still felt pressured to take on an extra internship, which is why I took them on in the spring,” Madonia, whose tuition is covered by the Wisconsin GI Bill — a tuition remission program for Wisconsin military veterans and their children — said. “I can’t imagine having to pay tuition on top of rent and everything else.”
Many UW students harbor concerns about college affordability, especially amid frequent tuition hikes and attending university in a state with some of the lowest funding toward higher education across the nation. Furthermore, Madison’s student housing crisis creates high rental prices near campus.
“There’s so much pressure to pick up a second internship or to just get a job in general,” Madonia said. “And then you have to balance that with your financial stress and classes, which is what you’re actually here for.”
Students often feel pressured to pick up internships, not just to afford college now, but to help their career prospects.
“There’s a lot of evidence that if you have an internship list on your resume, it is beneficial for increasing your employment prospects,” Kyoungjin Jang-Tucci, a PhD candidate in educational policy studies, told the Cardinal.
However, Jang-Tucci said the allure of an internship can put students in precarious situations, falling victim to unfair labor practices.
“[Interns] are usually at-will employees, and they can be fired at any time,” Jang-Tucci said, adding that employers tend to view the work of interns as lower value. “Even human to human, they are not treated equally as other workers in some places.”
Many internships are also underpaid or completely unpaid at all.
“You can’t make people work with the hope of getting another better job,” Jang-Tucci said.
Despite unpaid internships receiving more intense scrutiny in previous years, they are still common nationwide and are estimated to make up roughly half of all internship experiences.
“[Unpaid internships] are not something we advise students or encourage students to do, because we know that that often puts them at a disadvantage in terms of earning,” Megan Aley, associate director for communities and advising at SuccessWorks, the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science’s career advising office, told the Cardinal.
SuccessWorks provides a service called the Career Internship Fund which is available to students taking on summer internships. Students who apply to the fund can receive a grant of up to $5,000 to cover expenses like rent and groceries while they pursue their internship.
“UW-Madison has some initiatives to pay their students when they’re doing unpaid internships, but this is only addressing the problem on the college side,” Jang-Tucci said. “Employers are getting benefits from interns, and they should talk about payment as well.”
The heavy work-life balance can be a lot for students to juggle. Tara McKillop, a UW-Madison junior doing research with the Dane County Board of Supervisors, working two other jobs and serving as an undergraduate teaching assistant, feels her work commitments have made it hard for her to make time for other things she enjoys.
“I used to be part of the women’s water polo club, and this semester, the way I was scheduled for my hotel receptionist job, it just didn’t work out at all,” she said. “That large aspect of physical activity in my life plays a big factor in my mental health as well.”
As a desk receptionist for the Wisconsin Union Hotel, McKillop feels grateful to be able to do schoolwork while on the clock, but many others don’t have this luxury.
“I know a lot of other students will have to work in the food industry, or in dining halls,” she said. “Those jobs can take up your time in a lot larger chunks.”
Mo Cronesgrove, an employee at Rheta’s Market, agrees.
“The biggest grievance that everyone shares are unpaid days off,” Cronesgrove said, adding that dining hall employees are strictly restricted to three days off per semester. “Imagine if you work four days a week and you get really sick for one week — all your unpaid days off are gone, and you still have to come into work.”
They noted many of their coworkers have sustained injuries hurrying around Rheta’s during its busiest hours.
“Everybody who’s working here that I know has been burned at least once,” they said. “Someone I know had second degree burns, and they had to go to the hospital.”
Cronesgrove also said the busy work environment leads to exhaustion, which affects their whole UW-Madison experience.
“At Rheta’s, the first thing anyone says is ‘I am exhausted,’” Cronesgrove said. “Today I had to take a nap because I woke up exhausted, and I forced myself to go to work because I didn’t have an [unpaid workday] today so I didn’t get my readings done for my class.”
At Madonia’s internship with UW Athletics, she said she often feels the stress of schoolwork.
“When there are multiple sports going on and you have to travel with the team, that goes into ‘how much class am I going to miss? When am I going to be able to make up these assignments?’” she said, noting that she sometimes has to travel with the team for multiple days.
For Madonia, her internship’s fast-paced environment can lead to burnout.
“There are times where it’s like, we just finished that practice, and now I have to go back to the hotel room and work on an essay for four hours, and then there’s team dinner,” she said. “It’s very much go, go, go all of the time.”
Madonia and McKillop both feel a societal pressure to stay busy as well, and while they see value in busyness, they feel the emphasis placed on career experiences can be unhealthy for students at large.
“Personally, I love being busy because it makes me value the time that I don’t have anything going on so much more,” Madonia said. “But I think it’s a little bit unhealthy to be putting that pressure on an 18 or 19 year old freshman in their first year in college.”
On Canvas, UW-Madison students have access to a career preparation module, which Madonia says is indicative of the heavy emphasis the university places on students to build their resumes the moment they step foot on campus.
“I feel like there’s this really big culture on trying to be the most busy and trying to have the most impressive resume,” McKillop said. “I am nowhere near the best junior at UW-Madison or anything like that, but it's like once we graduate, what makes us stand out?”
Cronesgrove said poor and international students feel a particular pressure to pursue work experience.
“For people on scholarship, it’s an incredibly strong pressure that you need to do a bunch of things at once,” they said. “This is your only opportunity to better yourself so you need to pack your resume with stuff.”
