The Dartmouth Intern: Spying on the Real World

Susan was agitated. At age 23, a graduate of a private university with a major in journalism, she was about to launch a job hunt and she really didn't know the process. What should she do first? Send a potential employer her resume? Call? Drop by for a visit? Was her cover letter interesting enough? Long enough? Short enough?

Dartmouth students who choose the work world as one of their classrooms gain experience, but not credits. (Some universities do grant credits.) Sometimes we earn money, sometimes not. It depends upon the employer. The real benefits come in less concrete forms, such as a sense of independence, and with it, confidence. A year ago I ended up in Paris working at the International Herald Tribune earning a fulltime salary as a copy-aide. It was the first time I had been self-sufficient, paying the rent and the bills, shopping for food, meeting new people and creating a social life, even finding time to exercise (no more throwing the books aside at 4 p.m. for a run on country roads).

Interns get a chance to view a place from the inside to be spies of a sort. There is no secret about how we break in. It might be nice to think that employers hire us as interns because they are all bowled over by our knowledge and sophistication that is why John Lewis, M.D., of Manhattan hires three Dartmouth students a year to staff his office: he is impressed with their professionalism. But our most obvious qualification is availability. Because Dartmouth students can work almost any time of year, not just in the summer, we have increased opportunities to get jobs. And one experience leads to another.

These are the kinds of worries I heard about almost daily when I interned with Susan and two other recent college grads at the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in Washington, D.C., last spring. Susan's concerns were appropriate, I suppose: She had graduated one year earlier, was interning without pay at MacNeil/Lehrer, and was ready to look for a "real job." While I sympathized with Susan, I couldn't help thinking that Dartmouth students, as a rule, don't sound like her when they graduate. We may have some difficulty lining up that first job, but I think we approach the whole matter with much more confidence. And that, in large part, is an unexpected advantage of the Dartmouth Plan.

Dartmouth has been operating yearround since 1972 the year co-education began and Dartmouth students have had all kinds of opportunities to become educated. We can go abroad, stay at school, or take transfer courses elsewhere. We can perform service work, sometimes College-sponsored work, in places as widespread as Kicking Horse, Montana, and Kenya in Africa. We can also try our hands at several professions in the "real world."

Dartmouth does not run a formal internship program. What the College does do is provide resources so that students can find their own jobs. Career and Employment Services (CES), tucked upstairs in College Hall, sends out a bi-weekly newsletter to all students, including freshmen. The mailing sometimes over-whelming in length informs us of leave term and entry level jobs and workshops on resume writing and interviewing, as well as deadlines for grants and graduate programs. CES also keeps files of alumni who are willing to talk with students interested in their lines of work.

Some students find their internships different from what they expected, but nonetheless valuable. Adam Seessel '85 says, for example, that an internship "jolts you, wakes you up." He worked last winter as a copy boy at the New York Times. "I'm not as starry-eyed as I was before," he says. "It turned out to be rather corporate and stuffy but down-to-earth. It was none of this rhapsodic stuff I imagined. It was more like an assembly line." His conclusion is that he didn't enjoy the internship while he was there "But on looking back," he says, "it was a good experience."

Internship experiences can help in finding after-college employment. Alan Eagle '83 currently works as a sales support engineer at Fujitsu, a computer firm in Santa Clara, California. He says a five-month internship with IBM one spring "definitely"helped him get his present job.

But at what cost do we get these resume-building, character-strengthening experiences? It is not too difficult to notice that friends at other schools often wind up with good summer jobs. And they, unlike Dartmouth students, have the. traditional structure of nine months of school per year surrounded by friends. Susan, my friend at MacNeil/Lehrer, may lack preparedness in job strategy, but she happens to live with three very close college friends who all moved out together from Southern California. Invited to her home for dinner one night, I was. taken aback to discover how supportive an environment she lived in. I was a bit envious.

Dartmouth students will frequently acknowledge the disadvantages that go hand-in-hand with the D-Plan's flexibility. Some will tell you they feel cheated of an important part of college. Says Lisa Franck '84, who spent one quarter working for Dr. Lewis, "I don't know very many Dartmouth people very well." And that bothers her. Seessel agrees that there is a price paid. "It's tough," he says, but he knows where he stands on the issue: "You have to do what's best for you even if that leaves you out of sync with most of your friends. You have fewer friends, maybe, but it stretches you. You never get stale. You're always on your toes and it's refreshing." I think that's where I come down, too.

Laurie Kretchmar, an American studies majorfrom Los Altos, Calif., is one of the Magazine'sWhitney Cambell interns. Last summer, sheinterned for Mademoiselle magazine in NewYork City.