I graduated from a coding Bootcamp (Flatiron School) ~4 months ago and have been applying to jobs.

Last week, I got an offer for an unpaid internship at a very early stage startup. Despite many of the posts I read on Reddit advising against taking an unpaid internship, I decided to take the position. I wanted to share why I decided it might be a good idea for me based on my professional experience and the current times. Also, the internship lasts for a little over four months.

Reasons why you shouldn’t take an unpaid internship

1. Unpaid internships don’t lead to jobs according to “data”.

Looking at this chart, it doesn’t really look like unpaid internships lead to job offers. Also, apparently, the data shows that unpaid interns actually make less money when they do get jobs than people who never had internships…

However, one counterargument to this conclusion is that the study provided no information on the fields these students majored in. Certain majors are more likely to have unpaid internships and it could be that those fields just pay less (i.e. English and journalism fields) than fields that don’t have unpaid internships.

#job-hunting #internships #coding #software-engineering #javascript