The siren’s call of summer is upon us, and I, for one, am happy to be out of testing and books and learning, if only for a little while.

In this day and age, we can’t go ahead and do nothing over the summer. For some of us that means maybe getting a job. For most of us it means getting an unpaid internship somewhere. However, as educational as some internships can be, we need to be much more wary about where we choose to work.

As it stands, most internships are nothing more than free labor to your employers, and while labor law is a bit above my pay grade, with the way most internships work now, you might be better suited staying at home.

Let me be clear: I am speaking of internships with for-profit companies. The government makes it clear that it will not pay its interns because people would be up in arms if students were paid for their experience there. (Things are different when you are beholden to voters.)

In many cases, free labor really hurts the students involved. If someone gets his dream internship in another city, he has to provide housing and living expenses for himself, which the majority of students (and families) can’t afford.

It is conceivable that you could get another (paying) job, but how many of us can work 9 to 5 every day and immediately follow it up with restaurant work that doesn’t end till 2 or 3 in the morning? It goes without saying that there is no guarantee that a part-time job will actually provide all the money you need.

Of course, some of these interns do get paid, in a way. At Wash. U. we can get credit for internships through a very casual process. Those three credits could turn out to be very helpful down the road, right?

Or…not. The policy on internships here isn’t particularly useful. You get three credits that may not even count toward your major, and could actually hurt you, because most departments put limits on how many outside credits you can return to your major. You could get credit for that internship at Bank of America, but that means you can’t get credit for your time abroad, which in my mind makes it a wash. In the end, you are just getting credit for getting credit’s sake, not because it can be put toward something useful like a distribution or major requirement.

There are some schools that even charge for students to bring credit back from certain internships (UPenn and NYU do this sometimes), which means you are effectively paying an institution for not teaching you anything.

The reason we get internships might be for experience, or to build our resumes, but that isn’t exactly how it works. You will get experience doing work for others because most internships don’t give you a huge amount of leeway to learn.

Besides, I have been told time and time again that paid experience on a resume will always be better than an internship, even if you are just working at Starbucks.

I think that internships skirt the boundaries of what is legal and what isn’t, and in the current form don’t really provide students as much as they could. Students should be paid for their time—at least a small stipend that could help pay for living expenses. If the idea of paying people is so anathematic to employers, they should consider giving interns more responsibility and actually trying to give them more out of the process, rather than just have them around as a free hand.

Universities should start letting more credit come from other sources, or at least let internship credit count toward something. I understand that we are getting a “Wash. U. education”, and there should be limits on the number of classes we can take elsewhere, but by not letting me get payment out of my experience, Wash. U. is letting employers take advantage of me.

Ultimately, we need to be wary of what we do for the summer and what kind of internships we get. Sometimes it might be better, for a variety of reasons, just to go home and relax for a summer, especially if that means we will be more inclined to study when we get back, because that is much more important than any internship would be.