Drawing on my work in evolutionary ecology, wilderness ethics, and machine learning, I reflected on the tension between our desire to intervene and our limited ability to forecast long-term ecological outcomes. Using examples like the Chernobyl exclusion zone—where many species are thriving in the absence of people despite nuclear contamination—I argued that ecological recovery is often less about precision intervention and more about restraint. We discussed how machine learning can help us simulate alternative futures and understand potential tradeoffs, but that ultimately, the most powerful conservation tool may be humility. More wilderness, not more control, might be the best way to meet the uncertainties ahead.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a kid, I would copy down—by hand—the entirety of encyclopedia entries about animals. In fifth grade, I was regularly running natural history experiments (see photo). By senior year of high school, I was determined to earn, “PhDs in Biology and Ecology” (see embarrassing photo).

That goal might sound ambitious, but not outlandish to most folks, especially those currently in academia. But where I come from, it was in league with aspirations to become an NFL footballer, a rockstar, or lottery jackpot winner—life outcomes that, while theoretically possible, were implausible to the point of fantasy.

I come from a low-income family. Neither of my parents went to college. So, a college education, let alone graduate school, was not an expectation. Much the opposite. The fact that I went to college at all was a universal alignment of serendipity. If it hadn’t been for some friends explaining the process, a recycled plastic frisbee, and my dad’s meager life insurance after his overdose in my junior year, I certainly would not have gone to college.

Nevertheless, I managed to make that dream of a doctorate—from Yale, no less—come true. I even had my dream post-doc lined up with an amazing set of mentors and collaborators.

Then I decided to walk away.

That decision was the hardest, but simultaneously, the most obvious decision point of my entire life. Judging from the whinging about a lack of post-docs on science Twitter, it seems like others are taking a long hard look at the prospects of life in the academy and deciding to opt out as well.

For others at the decision point, here are some things to consider:

Hands-down, academics have the greatest disjunct between an overly inflated concept of self-worth yet accept horribly low monetary valuation of their worth. The average doctorate stipend in the US is somewhere between $15k and $30k. That’s less than California’s minimum wage going to lots of folks who already have Master’s degrees.

This paltry payout is enabled because most academics are heavily subsidized by their parents throughout grad school and afterward.  Morgan et al. (2021) showed that among academics, those with more educated parents received more support and encouragement. This translates to significant wealth gaps between first-gen grads and their peers. A Pew study from last year showed that even among college graduates, first-gen households had lower income (-27%) and much less wealth (-38%) than those whose parents were also college grads. Much of this effect is driven by the fact that kids with wealthy parents incur less or no debt for their education, setting them up for positive wealth–instead of negative wealth–going into graduate school and beyond. In addition to debt avoidance, wealthy parents also confer direct cash subsidies like down-payments for houses and inheritance. All of this means that folks with wealthy parents can accept lower wages.

And it turns out that folks who don’t really have to worry about the monetary benefits of a job are more likely to gravitate to jobs with lower than expected pay, but greater non-monetary benefits like prestige or job security.

Academia is the perfect trifecta of high prestige, high security (with tenure) and low pay. In fact, post-secondary education ranked first in Boar and Lashkari’s (2022) assessment of career intrinsic quality. Folks how receive less than about $50K from their parents (i.e. about the average most academics’ parents give them for a down-payment on a house or to pay for college) are more likely to chose jobs with negative intrinsic quality.

This is compounded by another reason that poor kids are so uncommon in the academy: your parent’s income is the single largest predictor of your early college attainment, far above any other demographic variable (Chetty et al., 2018).

The fact that most folks with PhDs come from wealthy parents with graduate degrees creates a vicious feedback cycle that drives down salaries from graduate student stipends through faculty salaries.

Those low doctoral salaries establish an abysmally low first tier in academic salary ladder. The average salary for a post-doc in the US is $47.5k. (It can be even less appealing internationally. I was offered a European post-doc that would have been < $35K after exchange rate and taxes).

The NSF post-doc salary I turned down would have been $56k, the suggested amount from NSF. For most newly graduated docs, a salary increase to $55k seems enormous to someone who just spent 5 years working 60 hours a week for $30K. But $55K is a paltry salary for someone with a PhD. Consider that the average salary for a professional clown in the US is nearly $50k, and let that subtle irony sink in.

The story outside of academia is much different. Doctorate degrees are actually worth something. And you don’t even have to sell your soul to industry. I got offers for conservation NGO positions for twice my post-doc salary and I interviewed with environmental funding organizations hiring at salaries three to five times my post-doc. I had a career in non-profit leadership before graduate school, so I was probably seeing the high end that the environmental NGO field had to offer. But conservation work is low-paying in general. Other fields have a much higher ceiling.

Right now, the field of data science is booming. Given that even the most field-oriented biologist likely spends most of their days staring at an R terminal doing statistics, every biologist is an experienced and competitive data scientist, de facto. Even in the data science field, you don’t have trade in your morals for your salary. NGOs are also hiring PhDs for data science roles. In fact, the position I ultimately abandoned academia for is with an education non-profit.

I think a lot of academics really want to help make the world a better place through their research. But, the fact that you can make double or triple the salary while doing far more immediately impactful good leaves almost nothing left on the scale in favor of academia.

In my role: I work remotely, have outstanding work-life balance, and a clear promotional track. Compare that to a post-doc where I’d be trying to wrap up unfinished papers from my doctorate on top of a heavy workload, in a temporary position, where the next career step involves competing with over 300 of my peers for a position half-way across the country that pays only slightly more than the people paid to watch Netflix all day.

One of the few benefits that academia can uniquely offer is the promise of tenure. Setting aside the fact that chasing tenure is simply prolonging one’s time chasing a carrot on a stick, tenured positions are dwindling every year. And the chance of transitioning from a post-doc into a tenure track position is abysmal and getting worse. Only about 10% of post-docs end up in tenured roles.

One overlooked downside of academia is that in addition to poor pay, the pay-off is delayed. Sure, in those rare cases you might end up with a six-figure, tenured professorship, but that reward is deferred well past the most important years of capital growth.

For instance, doctoral students and postdoc salaries make it basically impossible to save any money (especially for folks with student loans). As an example, I was making $40k in a full time NGO job right out of undergrad. From that income band, getting paid $33k while getting a PhD seemed like a good bet, given the eventual salary advantage of a degree. However, that calculus neglects to consider the life-timing of savings. The advantage of an extra $7k per year in your early 20s has disproportionate outcomes compared to the same amount later in life.

Consider this, the maximum allowable annual contribution to a Roth Retirement Account is $6k. If the paltry pay of grad stipends and postdocs prevents you from contributing to a Roth IRA for 7 years after undergrad, that mere $42k in lost pay compounds to a loss of nearly half a million dollars by retirement ($484k). (Do the calculations yourself: NerdWallet calculator)

And that’s just the cost of deferred retirement savings. The other engine of wealth accumulation in the US is home equity. Did you know: graduate stipends are not considered eligible income when applying for home loans. And don’t expect to wait until a post-doc, either. You need to be in a position for at least two years for it to be eligible income.*

(*There is a caveat that if you have a signed agreement of continued stipend for at least two years, your stipend could be eligible. But that means that you’d have to buy a house at the beginning of your PhD, when most folks can’t afford a down payment (unless you have wealthy parents to float you down-payment. Or unless you have parents who will gift you $300k in cash to buy your house, like one of my colleagues at Yale).

Ultimately, I’m not saying that a career in academia is a poor life-decision. I’m just saying that a career in academia is a poor life decision if you’re from a poor family.

Folks with external subsidies (even minorly) have the liberty to make decision to follow the dream of academia in a way that those of us who have to generate our own income cannot. Academia runs on those external subsidies. If your family can’t float you during your unpaid summer internships, or loan you cash to pay for the conference that you may or may not get reimbursed for 8 months later, or cover the down payment on your eventual house, … etc., you are going to end up way behind in life.

Unfortunately, this reality remains unseen by those currently in the academy. Academics love to worry about inequality, but because most of them are from upper-middle class to rich families, they manage to overlook the enormous impact of wealth inequality in academia. (Hell, most academic institutions actively avoid even collecting the data that would illuminate this reality).

In the end, overlooking the consequence of wealth subsidies leads mentors to encourage any student who shows an interest to pursue academic careers because they confuse what they wish to be true: “The academy is open to all” with what is, in fact, true: “Academia is a terribly unwise career for folks from poor families.”

I contend that mentors should feel ethically compelled to lay out the Sisyphean asymmetry to mentees from low-income backgrounds. If that makes you uncomfortable, the answer is to fix the system, not to mislead mentees with unexamined ‘luxury beliefs.’

Until that system gets fixed, more of us trailer home alumni will keep unhappily walking away from our dream.

[Updated 2022 Sept. 09 with some recent, relevant research papers]

[Updated 2022 Dec. 10 with information from this Pew report]

 References:

Boar, C., and Lashkari, D. (2022). Occupational Choice and the Intergenerational Mobility of Welfare. Available at: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29381/w29381.pdf.

Cheng, S. D. (2021). What’s Another Year? The Lengthening Training and Career Paths of Scientists. in (Harvard University Department of Economics). Available at: https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f159298.pdf.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., and Porter, S. R. (2018). Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective. doi: 10.3386/w24441.

Morgan, A., Clauset, A., Larremore, D., LaBerge, N., and Galesic, M. (2021). Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty. doi: 10.31235/osf.io/6wjxc.

Schultz, R., Stansbury, A., Albright, A., Bleemer, Z., Cheng, S., Fernández, R., et al. (2022). 22-4 socioeconomic diversity of economics PhDs. Available at: https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pdf.

I recently wrote a paper looking at how frog breeding timing is impacted by climate change. So, I’ve been reading lots of ecological studies of phenology (more on phenology later). One thing that struck me is how almost everyone in ecology misuses the term “Julian Day” when they mean Day-of-Year.

Day-of-Year (DOY), as the name suggests, is the count number of a given day in the year. So, Jan 25 is DOY 25 and March 1 is either DOY 60 or DOY 61 depending if it is a leap year. And we can express the time of day as a decimal, so that 3pm on January 1 is DOY 1.625.

Julian day is a completely different way to measure time. It was defined by an astronomer named Joseph Scalinger back in 1583 (and so, takes serious precedent over contemporary ecologists trying to hijack the term).

The point is, DOY and Julian day/date are wildly different things designed to measure wildly different phenomena.

Unlike DOY that starts counting on January 1^st in any given year, the Julian day count starts on January 1, 4713 BC. There is a complicated historical reason that Scalinger chose 4713 as the starting date that had to do with wedding the Julian and Gregorian dates during the calendar reform (read all about that here), but the point is, DOY and Julian day/date are wildly different things designed to measure wildly different phenomena.

For instance, I’m writing this blog on the 25^th of January 2020.

The DOY today is: 25

The Julian day today is: 2458873

But, it gets even crazier because unlike the DOY count that starts at midnight, Julian days start counting at Noon. So, right now, at 1030am the Julian day is 2458873, but after lunch it will be 2458874.

The Julian day metric is essentially worthless for comparing seasons. There is no ecologist who uses true Julian days; so, please, ecologist, don’t say Julian Day when you mean Day-of-Year.

As Gernot Winkler, former USNO Timer Service director notes:

“[Mixing Julian Day and DOY] is a grossly misleading practice that was introduced by some who were simply ignorant and too careless to learn the proper terminology. It creates a confusion which should not be taken lightly. Moreover, a continuation of the use of expressions “Julian” or “J” day in the sense of a Gregorian Date will make matters even worse. It will inevitably lead to dangerous mistakes, increased confusion, and it will eventually destroy whatever standard practices exist.”

So why does everyone misuse Julian Day? My hunch is that Julian Day sounds more technical than DOY, so folks gravitate toward it and others follow suit without ever questioning what it means.

Why do we care about studying seasonal change across years?

Phenology is the study of seasonal cycles of lifehistory like when bears go into hibernation, when flowers open, or when geese migrate. Phenology is a hot topic these days because climate change is causing wild populations to change their seasonal timing (Thackeray et al. 2016). For instance, frogs increasingly start calling and breeding earlier (Li et al. 2013) and forests green-up earlier (Cleland et al. 2007).

On one hand, shifts in lifehistory timing might be a good way to cope with climate change, but it can be bad news if shifts in one species causes a misalignment in an ecological relationship (Miller-Rushing et al. 2010; Visser & Gienapp 2019). For example, European flycatcher migration generally coincides with a boom in caterpillars that feed on oaks. However, climate change drives oaks to bud earlier, which means that all the juicy caterpillars turn chrysalises before the birds show up (Both & Visser 2001; Both et al. 2006). Similarly, snowshoe hares evolved to change coat color from white to brown in winter, but as snow melts earlier and earlier each year, rabbits are stuck with white coats for too long and become easy targets for predators (Mills et al. 2018).

Needless to say, it is important for use to be able to compare when in the season these critical phenomena take place and compare their change across years. When we do so, we are using DOY to align datasets across year, not Julian day; so, ecologists, let’s stop using the wrong term.

References:

Both, C., Bouwhuis, S., Lessells, C. M., and Visser, M. E. (2006). Climate change and population declines in a long-distance migratory bird. Nature 441, 81–83. 

Both, C., and Visser, M. E. (2001). Adjustment to climate change is constrained by arrival date in a long-distance migrant bird. Nature 411, 296–298. 

Cleland, E. E., Chuine, I., Menzel, A., Mooney, H. A., and Schwartz, M. D. (2007). Shifting plant phenology in response to global change. Trends Ecol. Evol. 22, 357–365. 

Li, Y., Cohen, J. M., and Rohr, J. R. (2013). Review and synthesis of the effects of climate change on amphibians. Integr. Zool. 8, 145–161. 

Miller-Rushing, A. J., Høye, T. T., Inouye, D. W., and Post, E. (2010). The effects of phenological mismatches on demography. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 365, 3177–3186. 

Mills, L. S., Bragina, E. V., Kumar, A. V., Zimova, M., Lafferty, D. J. R., Feltner, J., et al. (2018). Winter color polymorphisms identify global hot spots for evolutionary rescue from climate change. Science 359, 1033–1036. 

Thackeray, S. J., Henrys, P. A., Hemming, D., Bell, J. R., Botham, M. S., Burthe, S., et al. (2016). Phenological sensitivity to climate across taxa and trophic levels. Nature 535, 241–245. 

Visser, M. E., and Gienapp, P. (2019). Evolutionary and demographic consequences of phenological mismatches. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 879–885. 

The featured image of this post is from joiseyshowaa under creative commons usage.

I’m really impressed with their position. It’s clear that they’ve already thought about the problem of unpaid internships a lot.

I especially want to highlight that I completely empathize with PARC in that these issues are moving targets, especially from the perspective of large, all-volunteer organizations. That PARC is actively working on fixing the problem is to their credit.

I also want to make a strong point that I failed to fully articulate in my last post: the responsibility shouldn’t fall solely on the organizations to fund internship—all of us that appreciate and benefit from the work of those organizations do should feel responsible, too.

The responsibility shouldn’t fall solely on the organizations to fund internship—all of us that appreciate and benefit from the work of those organizations do should feel responsible, too.

I feel really fortunate that I landed a paid internship (shout out to Sitka Conservation Society) right out of undergrad. When that internship rolled into a salaried position, I was already inculcated into the stance that if we couldn’t afford an intern, then we couldn’t offer an internship. But I’ve also served on the Board of Directors for a couple of non-profits and have struggled with the desire to get work done on a slim budget and the temptation to seek willingly free labor from unpaid interns.

The root of the problem is that all of us undervalue the important work of non-profits. If our nonprofits were well funded, this issue would never arise. Unfortunately, environmental organizations receive the least philanthropy of any sector (grouped with animal groups, the sector receives just 2.8% of total charitable contributions annually).

I fear that my first post came across as more of a call-out of NEPARC than a general call-to-action. I’m not a fan of call-out culture, so I hope you will join me in this call-to-action to support PARC. I decided to pony up on my offer to support PARC. I really hope you will make a donation too. They suggest that the best ways to support them are to donate to their non-profit partner, the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, or buy some sweet PARC swag.

Or, just take a minute to donate to your favorite environmental non-profit, and feel good that you are helping to end the need for unpaid internships.

Here is the response from PARC, in full:

“Dear Andis,

I’m writing to you on behalf of PARC‘s Executive Committee with regard to your recent blog post: The problem with unpaid pseudo-internships.

First, I’d like to thank you for sharing your perspective and for highlighting actionable steps that PARC must take to ensure equitable and just practices within our organization. I’d also like to apologize for the delayed response; PARC is an all-volunteer organization and it often takes a few days (if not longer) to gather and address feedback from all of the appropriate entities.

We (the National PARC leadership) agree with your views on the issue of unpaid internships in ecology/conservation. This is an issue we have been working to address for the last year. In fact, we have restructured our internships at the national level of PARC (i.e., within the Executive Committee, which oversees the regional and state chapters) to reflect some of the key points addressed in your blog post. In some cases, we have opted to hire contractors rather than creating internships. In other cases, we have opted to provide hourly compensation to interns and to intentionally model the positions in a way that provides the intern with clear learning- and skill-based objectives and opportunities for professional development. With this updated model, we hope that our interns gain as much value from us as we do from them.

As this is a relatively new approach for us, we have not yet developed guidance on this issue for PARC‘s regional and state chapters (again as a volunteer driven organization, these things can take some time). Our extensive discussions were put in place at the national level but never translated into policies and/or guidelines. This, we believe, is a failure on our part. We hope to remedy this shortcoming by taking the following actions:

1 – We will provide time/space for discussion regarding the points you’ve raised in your blog post on our Joint National Steering Committee (which includes regional co-chairs and external partners) and National Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion task team (DEITT) monthly conference calls. Following these discussions, we will work with NE PARC to ensure that appropriate adjustments are made with regard to the social media position.

2 – We are currently developing a best practices document for engaging members and recruiting leaders at the regional and state levels. We will include a section on internships that will provide guidelines for creating equitable and ethical internships.

3 – We will ask the DEITT to provide feedback on our internship guidelines to ensure they reflect PARC‘s goal of providing an equitable platform for our members, partners, and stakeholders to engage in the conservation of amphibians and reptiles.

Thank you again for taking the time to bring this issue to our attention. We are hopeful that in the future, with the assistance of the DEITT, we can be more proactive in addressing these kinds of issues. If you are interested in joining PARC‘s DEI efforts, please consider reaching out to the DEITT co-chairs Neha Savant & David Muñoz (copied on this email). I’ve attached a document that highlights the team’s recent projects/accomplishments.

Best,

Alex Novarro (on behalf of PARC‘s Executive Committee)“

A few weeks ago, Northeast Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (NEPARC) sent out a request with the title: “NEPARC is Seeking a Social Media and Outreach Specialist Internship (Volunteer)!”

I was intrigued, not because I need a new job, but because the announcement sounded fishy. For one, unpaid internships are bad news in general, but it also sounded a lot like what I call a pseudo-internship.

Pseudo-internships are positions that organizations label as internships but are really not internships at all. These positions usually arise when an organization identifies a specific job they would like to see accomplished but are unable (really just unwilling—more on that in a minute) to either 1.) hire a one-time contractor, 2.) pay an employee to pick up the work, or 3.) find a benevolent volunteer.

In addition to violating labor law (more on that in a minute), these pseudo-internships, when unpaid, have the pernicious and unintended consequence of perpetuating inequality and disadvantaging poor folks, especially young poor folks who are trying to begin their careers.

The reason is that internship experience has real value as currency on resumes. You are more likely to get hired for a job or accepted to a graduate program with one or two relevant internships under your belt, because hiring/admission committees recognize the value of real-world experience. That is, assuming the internship was legit, and not a pseudo-internship.

The problem with unpaid pseudo-internships is that it shifts the burden of living expenses and other external costs onto the “intern.” So, unless your parents are paying your rent or you are otherwise independently wealthy, you are faced with either 1.) working two jobs simultaneously, 2.) going into debt to work for free, or 3.) avoiding unpaid internships. The result is that unpaid internships are out of reach to working-class folks.

But, it gets worse. The proliferation of unpaid interships makes paid internships super competitive. And when a bunch of great resumes come in for a paid position, chances are the top candidates will already have an unpaid internship as a resume line. Thus, unpaid internship effectively make paid internships equally unattainable for poor folks.

Fake internships like NEPARC’s compound the problem because the intern doesn’t even receive specific training to make the financial burden worthwhile (more on that below).

So, I wrote to NEPARC:

“Hi NEPARC organizers,

I wanted to say that I really appreciate all you do. I also wanted to share a perspective as a first-generation college student concerning this position. 

Unpaid positions like these are huge disappointments to low-income students. I love herps and would have loved a position like this, but those of us without independent wealth or family support cannot afford to even entertain the idea of unpaid internships. It is even more of a heartbreak realizing that kids who can afford to work for free will be able to use positions like this to build their resume and stack the deck even more toward inequality in applying for subsequent positions. In addition to being a disappointment, it also send the signal that NEPARC is not interested in poor folks and undermines the organization’s commitment to inclusion. It also send the signal that NEPARC doesn’t value its own work or conservation in general if it is not worth paying someone even a minimal stipend to do the work.”

I didn’t want to be the kind of Slacktivist that complains without offering to help, so I added:

“I realize NEPARC likely does not have a budget for this position. At minimum wage, 10 hours/month for 4 months is ~$600. I will commit to a donation $200 to help fund a stipend, if you all will use it as leverage to help raise the rest of the funds. Let me know if this is something you all would be willing to do.

Again, thanks for all of your hard work!

Best,

Andis”

…and the response was:

“Dear Andis,

Thank you for your comments.  I will make sure to bring this up with the Steering Committee over our next conference call.

Regards,”

My hope was that the NEPARC folks would instantly see the negative effects of their good intentions and either take me up on my offer or find another means to accomplish their outreach goals. After all, I’m a grad student and I’m willing to pony up to make this position ethical, it seems like their Board would jump on the fundraising potential given their fiduciary and ethical responsibility to the organization.

Hell, I would even have been happy if they just took the word “intership” out of the announcement and leave it as “volunteer.”

Instead, I got a mass mailing in my inbox a few days ago with the same title: “NEPARC is Seeking a Social Media and Outreach Specialist Internship (Volunteer)!”

So, it seems that even in full knowledge of the problems with pseudo-internships, NEPARC is not only unwilling to make an ethical move, they are completely willing to turn down a donation to help them do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love NEPARC, and I don’t think their intentions are bad—rather I think that they still don’t grok the gravity of the problem. Having been a director on multiple non-profit boards, I can empathize.

But in addition to the ethical problem, there is a legal problem associated with pseudo-internships that should make the NEPARC board very wary.

A few years ago, the Department of Labor, recognizing the ethical and economic problems of unpaid internships, cracked down on the practice by establishing criteria for internships and setting penalties for employers that violate the rules. Although the Republican administration weakened the criteria last year, the legal foundation remains. The old criteria included:

• The intern and the employer understand that there is no expectation of compensation during the internship and no job guarantee thereafter.
• The internship provides similar training to that given in an educational environment—like clinical training.
• The internship is tied to the intern’s formal education program through integrated coursework or academic credit.
• The internship is aligned with the academic calendar.
• The intern’s work complements—rather than displaces—paid employees’ work and provides significant educational benefits to the intern.

And the new criteria:

• Both parties understand that the intern is not entitled to compensation.
• The internship provides training that would be given in an educational environment.
• The intern’s completion of the program entitles him or her to academic credit.
• The internship corresponds with the academic calendar.
• The internship’s duration is limited to the period when the internship educates the intern.
• The intern’s work complements rather than displaces the work of paid employees while providing significant educational benefits.
• The intern and the employer understand that the internship is conducted without entitlement to a paid job at the internship’s end.

Nowhere does NEPARC’s position description mention any form of training, nor certainty of academic credit, and no alignment with the academic calendar. This position fails even the extremely loose new rubric.

Regardless of the legal definition, internships are supposed to be intentionally and explicitly educational—the educational benefits of an internship should not be just the by-products of providing free-labor, which is the only angle the NEPARC position takes in the “Benefits to the Volunteer Intern” section.

A position description for an internship should focus solely on what the employer will provide to the intern in terms of trainings to develop hard and soft skills. It is painfully clear that the NEPARC description is directed entirely at what the organization wants to get out of the internship, NOT what they intend to provide. For example, a quick scan of the “Qualifications” section makes it clear that they want someone who already has outreach and communications experience. Unless NEPARC has a professional communications person on staff to offer higher-level training (They don’t.), there is no way they could even offer a learning environment if they accept an applicant with “advanced experience handling professional social media account; previous development of social media marketing… [and] a background in media relations skills, advertising, building audience engagement…” This position description is not written for an intern, it is clearly written for an independent contractor, whether the NEPARC board realizes it or not.

Bottom line:

We MUST stop trawling for free-labor under the guise of “internships.” It is questionably legal and definitely unethical. Even worse, it entrenches inequality, keeps poor-folks out of the field, and send a clear message that the organization doesn’t value its own work.