As thousands of students prepare to work internships this summer for little or no pay, some have turned to crowdfunding to cover basic living and travel costs.
Crowdfunding allows individuals to post online descriptions of their needs and receive donations from friends or anonymous donors.
Emmanuel Hui ’17 plans to spend the summer in Fiji working as an unpaid intern with the United Methodist Volunteers in Mission, where he will shadow doctors and educate the island’s residents about disease prevention.
Hui decided to launch a campaign on crowdfunding platform GoFundMe after he didn’t get funding from the College. His five-week internship fell short of the Tucker Foundation and the Dickey Center’s eight-week length requirements.
Hui, who has raised $650 of his $2,000 goal, said he thinks it is important for people who use crowdfunding sites to reflect on whether their motives are worthwhile, adding that he does not approve of people launching campaigns to raise money for superficial and self-serving reasons.
He said his donations have come from friends, acquaintances and high school teachers.
When she realized that College funding would not cover all of her expenses, Autumn Brunelle ’15 turned to GoFundMe to fund her internship at the Kahalu’u Bay Education Center in Hawaii.
As of press time, Brunelle had raised $710 of her $1,000 goal.
Ashley Park ’14 used the same site last fall to raise $3,100 for a missionary service trip in Mozambique over winter break.
Park said she raised $1,000 in one day and, after two weeks, had raised two thirds of her goal. Although she started with a $3,000 goal, she later raised it to $3,500 due to additional travel costs and the around 8 percent cut the site takes of each campaign’s total.
Hui, Brunelle and Park are some of the many college students nationwide who accept, yet struggle to afford, unpaid opportunities.
Suffolk University law professor and intern labor rights advocate David Yamada wrote in an email that although crowdfunding campaigns are sometimes able to fill the income gap left by unpaid internships, these campaigns are only “stopgap measures.”
The jobless rate among individuals in their early twenties has consistently remained above the national average, measuring 10.6 percent in April 2014 as compared to 6.3 percent overall.
While some can afford to finance these internships themselves or with the help of parents, many have noted that the lack of pay perpetuates a class divide, particularly as internships are seen as essential resume-builders.
Yamada noted that crowdfunding is not a solution to this socioeconomic gap, as it is likely that students who can successfully raise money in this way have more affluent networks. This further creates socioeconomic divisions among students seeking to complete unpaid internships.
Students from colleges across the country join Dartmouth students in turning to crowdfunding to support summer internship plans.
Parker Stewart, a junior at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is using Kickstarter to raise money for an internship at the Western Environmental Law Center, though which he will travel throughout the West documenting current environmental issues the country faces.
Stewart estimates his needs at around $7,000, of which he had raised $6,550 from 75 backers by press time. According to Kickstarter’s policies, Stewart will not keep the funds raised if he does not meet his goal by the time his campaign ends.
Stewart will send photographs as rewards to backers by the end of his internship. Most of his backers, he said, are friends and family.
Yale University junior Erin Castillo Holder is using GoFundMe to raise money for her unpaid summer internship at the Smithsonian Institution and she has raised $1,675 so far. Castillo Holder said she picked the site because it offered the least restrictions and took a lower cut of the money raised.
Although Castillo Holder had applied for funds from Yale, her internship offer came late in the semester, forcing her to withdraw her applications.
