WorkZone: Businesses feel absence after interns leave
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It feels noticeably roomier inside the Downtown offices of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh.
With the departure of the five summer interns, the last of whom left 10 days ago, the staff of the nonprofit international affairs organization was nearly halved.
"They did a huge deal of work for us," said Christina Unger, the education program manager. "It's definitely hard to lose them."
Across the region and nation, various organizations are finding themselves spread thin after bidding goodbye to the interns who brought valuable ideas and pairs of capable hands. Gone are the eager smiles and torrents of questions, replaced with mountains of work that leaner staffs must tackle without any extra help.
To cope with the departures, firms are lining up part-time staff, re-prioritizing to-do lists or sometimes just waiting anxiously for the next group of interns to arrive.
This summer at the World Affairs Council, unpaid interns worked 30 hours per week to supplement the six-member staff. Tasks ranged from putting together information about each of the G-20 nations, to organizing an educators' trip to Europe, to writing questions for Academic WorldQuest, a high school competition that tests knowledge of current affairs.
Now that they're gone, the gap is hard to fill.
"A lot of times, when something comes up, we say, 'Oh, this would be a perfect project for Andrew!' And then we remember he's not here anymore," Ms. Unger said. "We get so used to having them here and suddenly they're gone."
Susan McIntosh, the intake manager at the American Civil Liberties Union in Oakland, felt the same way when her eight undergraduate mentees finished up and left behind an office that was "very, very quiet."
During the summer, they responded to phone, online and written requests for assistance and did general office work such as photocopying and stuffing envelopes.
Ms. McIntosh's claim that the ACLU "wouldn't be able to do half of our work without our interns" isn't an exaggeration.
When the interns are there, the office can respond to 20 to 60 intakes per day. Now, with just a full-time staff of five, that number drops to five intakes per day.
Until the fall internship season begins in September, the office is understaffed and reverts to a lower level of service, she said. "We have to decide which things to respond to first, and there's more of a lag time."
For organizations dealing with the departure of a significant number of interns, she stressed the importance of planning. "If you don't have enough personnel, make sure the things that fall away are the most low priority things you want to accomplish."
The Pittsburgh Opera manages to avoid the problem of understaffing by holding internships throughout the year, so there is almost never a time when there are no extra hands at the Downtown organization.
Still, the departure of each group has a conspicuous impact on the "exciting, invigorating" atmosphere they bring, said Bill Powers, director of administration and artistic operation.
That's also true for Branding Brand, a marketing and search engine optimization firm in Oakland that hires 12 interns, half of whom work on marketing and the other half on writing assignments for clients. There is a dry spell between the end and start of different internship sessions.
"The interns definitely bring us all together. It's normally pretty quiet, but there's a social aspect when they're here," said marketing director Joey Rahimi.
Though internships are meant to be mutually beneficial, both sides can sometimes feel short-shrifted.
For instance, Mr. Rahimi noted the students' commitment sometimes doesn't match up to the investment by his firm. "Interns get the summertime blues. You can tell they don't really want to be here. They want to be out and relaxing."
Though organizations benefit from the work interns do, students often receive little or no compensation for their labor and no staff benefits such as paid vacation time. Sometimes the opportunity winds up being far from what the intern imagined, and involves more coffee-fetching than actual learning.
Branding Brand seeks to cultivate its interns' talent by giving them stand-alone projects that they complete during the summer. That also helps the full-time staff.
The "old rule of internships" ensures there won't be a staff panic once they leave, said Mr. Rahimi.
"You shouldn't be making an intern do something a full-time person would be doing. They should be doing something that's more beneficial to their learning experience."
First Published August 31, 2009 12:00 am
