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John Gear makes a good point about internships and "pink collar ghettos":
>However three fields (traditionally female dominated in this century) are
>known for unpaid "practicums": teaching, nursing, and social work.
>There are, of course, exceptions, but most of the students in these
>fields are expected to *pay* tuition for the semesters "course" which
>consists of donating free labor to institutions in their field.
Yep, and when I was in library school, we had unpaid "field work", which meant
we moved books and dusted shelves the librarians saved just for us...
However, a co-op student from the Professional Writing Program at the
University of Waterloo, which bases its co-op program on the very successful
and effective _engineering_ co-op program, got paid very nearly my salary
_yikes!_, and got to write her own manual when she was with us. It is true that
she also had to hand-compile an index, but it was good practice and
educational, despite being unpleasant.
I agree--fight the forces of pink collar ghettoization. I also don't approve of
using young writers to do the sh_t work.
Note: I got out of library work (despite loving reference work, research and
other information provision services) partly because I could make 20 grand
more a year doing technical writing...
Cheers,
Gwen (ggall -at- ca -dot- oracle -dot- com)
Oracle MultiDimension
"The foreseeable future. A cliche, and a fuzzy one. How much of the
future is foreseeable? Ten minutes? Ten years? Any of it? By whom is it
foreseeable? Seers? Experts? Everybody?"
--Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style"
