How does your office treat its interns?

better than they treat me, the fucking assholes

My office size is about 300-350 employees.85% are through a temp. agency. I get a big 2 paid days off xmas and 4th of July. Health insurance is available but its pretty shady ($25 dollars a week covers $75 of a Dr.'s visit). Career prospects- fast food pays as much to start-give me the rope now.....

We don't have them in most cases in the UK, I think. Can you tell us exactly what they are?

People (usually young people) who are receiving practical experience under supervision in a chosen field. In the nonprofit sector, generally unpaid; in other sectors, either paid with a stipend or a very low wage. Increasingly instead of offering entry-level positions with benefits, companies in the U.S. (maybe elsewhere) expect people to do a few months to a year internship before they can enter the field in earnest. This obv discriminates against those people who don't have an alternate means of financial support. The interns we have in my office, however, are all undergraduates working in the hours between classes.

I wonder if people in the U.S. can either affirm or contest my summary.

Closest thing I've known is the 'placement year': in between the second and third academic years on many courses, you work for some company for very low wages for a year, to gain experience. It's cheap labour, but I deliberately went for a degree with this, because I knew I was going to be 40 when I graduated, and I thought that having no experience in the field at that age would make getting a decent job very hard indeed. A bit of very good experience (and a better reference from the placement than I would have ever imagined) would help, I thought. I did my placement in the university, mostly working on university software. The job I eventually got afterwards was in a parallel unit in another university. Given how hard it was to find a job, and that I was told that that placement year was vital in my getting an interview at this current job, I'm sure it was a big help for me. The unit I worked for was originally set up by placement students there years before, so treated us well and was willing to give you extraordinary levels of responsibility if you did well - I think I was given more than anyone up to then, as they had me doing the analysis and design work and supervising other programmers.

We have several summer students, I was one of the first three they tried last sumemr and was offered full time/permant. Another came back again this summer but has two more terms to go and we had another C++ programmer come on board from Waterloo.
Its an extremely good idea to higher summer students, they work for 1/2 to /13 the costs, they kicka bout for the same length as a probationary period so you can see if they fit or not and it makes the office appear more youthfull. As I've probably mentioned before, Im one of two people out of 70 under the age of 30 which is old in the tech industry even today. Most people here broke in with AS400/COBOL and a few have even had to deal with punch cards.
Interships suck ass if their for a regular position though.

The US Govt. has an excellent intern program and I don't think I can name a single intern I've worked with (out of manymanymany) that has complained or had any reason to complain about their lot. They get to go from office to office and work on the most interesting things we do, and they are paid and rewarded the same as regular civilian employees at their level. I on the other hand get treated like a poop, and do a great deal of shitwork, but then again I did sign up for it. There's even HS students who get to come here and work on things, though I have no idea what it is exactly that they do.

I've been leading a campaign to make the word "intern" into another slang term for "prostitute". "Hooker", "intern", "whore": I am hoping these all become equivalent in the near future. It would amuse me.

Organizations that only offer unpaid internships (eg record labels) reap what they sow. One look at US record labels et al. should be evidence enough of what this entails.

???

Thinking of interning, amateur!st?

just finished actually

"How does your office treat its uterus?"