Summations Only

Yes, but I meant "as compared to working for yourself." If working for someone else without pay is an option, then working for yourself without pay certainly is. Not "as compared to doing nothing at all", which is what many of you are arguing. Well, yes, getting paid for it is better. Duh. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about working for someone else for nothing, vs. working for yourself for nothing.Maybe you can't work for nothing! In that case you won't be able to work for yourself for nothing. But in that case you can't work for anyone else for nothing, either. If you can work for nothing, then work for yourself. Don't work for nothing for someone else, it makes no sense.I don't see why this is hard to follow, I guess.

Others can provide insight, expertise, access to situations, places and people and all sorts of other things that a complete novice can't just go off and obtain on their own. Working for someone else can provide an entire ready made infrastructure that just is not otherwise available.I did unpaid work experience in an engineering firm. I found it hugely beneficial. I could not have knocked-up my own engineering firm and started discussing technical details with ready-made-clients.This sort of benefit over pure-self-unpaid-employment seems rather obvious to me.

Well, but you can go off and obtain that on your own.That was the point of my response to CS, who made largely the same argument. You don't have to do any useless busywork to get the things you mentioned. If you want access to a situation, go get access to a situation. Nobody else in that situation is there in exchange for working for free, so clearly you don't need to. Insight and expertise are out there for the taking, and as you do the work your own will develop. You certainly could have been doing engineering on your own. And it seems obvious to me that you can get all that and still work for yourself. And in the meantime, you don't send a market signal that your labor is worthless.

Why would anyone discuss their million + pound engineering project with someone who has no engineering experience and who hasn’t even completed their degree as yet?The reason the did discuss their million + pound project with me was because I was in the main meeting room at the impressive offices of an established engineering firm and in the company of several experienced and qualified engineers who introduced me as a trainee. This unpaid work experience afforded me opportunities otherwise unavailable.The idea that I could’ve achieved this same level of access by ringing these guys up and asking them to meet me alone to discuss their million + pound project over a coffee in Starbucks is laughable.

Because they were your professors?Why wouldn't you have taken engineering classes from people who would be able to discuss million-pound engineering projects? What unpaid work experience, though? You've just told me about being in a meeting room. What, were you there to hold a chair down? I'm sure you could have talked your way into that meeting room any number of ways. Whatever time you spent making copies, fetching coffee, whatever - was time you weren't spending working as an engineer or studying engineering.Also, one last thing. I'm curious how you put that experience on your resume. "Expensive engineering projects were discussed in my vicinity"? The potted plants can make the same claim but I doubt they'd get hired as engineers.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I've been doing a fair bit of lurking on this (and many other) threads, but I do have to weigh in on this one: My field is law, but my understanding is that many professions are the same as mine, in that the greatest expertise is not concentrated in the hands of those teaching undergraduate (or even graduate) classes in their fields at university.In my experience, nonce of my university professors would have been able to perform anywhere near as well as the guys I have worked with in private practice over the years, when it comes to multi-million pound deals. The experience of the private sector guys is hugely superior, every time. Not because they're cleverer, or more academically able, but because their commercial and practical experience is greater.My exposure to the professions I know suggests that this is nearly universally correct. The guys in question do not refer to their gurus as being professors - they refer to them as being the directors or partners they learnt with as they grew into the profession.You don't stop learning your craft when you qualify at university - in my experience, that's when you really start to learn it.

I think you guys went to the wrong universities, then. My embedded systems design professor had years of experience at Motorola. Engineering especially is one of those fields where its important to study with people who have industry background. I guess I don't disagree, but I would question the value of an education that didn't prepare you, by commencement, to do significant and non-trivial work in that field. A civil engineering graduate should be able to design a bridge.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I can't speak for engineering, but when it comes to law, accountancy, surveying, architecture - those are fields where (according to what I've seen) the experience gained at university is a pre-requisite to qualification, but is generally not given by professors who are at the top of their field professionally. They are highly intelligent, extremely clever people, but not able to give as good work experience as the people you work with when you leave university.I don't think we're hugely far apart on this though.

Law professors vary greatly in experience, and I wouldn't try to make such a sweeping statement. Lots of top professions perform as adjunct professors. During my own time at school I had classes taught by a judge on the state supreme court, by a practicing patent attorney with decades of experience, a very experienced tax attorney, and by very experienced constitutional law professors. But there were also instructions who had spend nearly all of their time in academia and had limited experience practicing law.One peculiarity about law schools is that the higher ranked law schools don't teach much about the actual practice of law, and tend to concentrate on teaching the principles behind the law. Those schools teach a generalization of the law and don't teach the black letter law even of the state. But most of their graduates won't practice in state anyway. By contrast, the lessor known, regional schools tend to focus more on being able to open a law firm in the state in which they reside one day after graduation.But guess which set of graduates law firms want to pay huge salaries to upon graduation. Not the ready to practice graduates who know how to practice in state, but the graduates who can be apprentices in any state.My experience as an engineer is that the typical engineering graduates ready to be an apprentice and that no one would expect a newly graduated civil engineer to be able to design a bridge or any other project impacting public safety on his own.

I was studying physics. Over the summer between the second and third year of my degree I worked in an engineering firm where I aided one of their designers with some mathematical modelling. I used the project I was working on at this engineering company as the project for my 'computational physics' module of the course. A senior engineer oversaw/mentored both myself and the designer in question. No. They were real clients of the engineering firm in question. I don't think many of my professors had anything like the experience of such things as the real engineers I was working with. Working on mathematically modelling real live engineering situations. I actually did surprisingly little of that. They took me on (albeit unpaid) coz my degree (theoretical physics) suggested a level of mathematical competence that was missing from some of their staff.In truth I am not sure how much I was really able to add much to their project. But the experience of working with real engineers was of massive benefit to me. And I don't see how I could have got that experience without working in that setting. Albeit unpaid.

Yes, I was aware that they were clients of your engineering firm. Obviously. You seem to have completely misunderstood what I just said. That sounds like exactly the sort of highly technical work for which it was illegal to hire an unpaid intern for. Can you explain why you shouldn't have been paid for it?I mean, certainly one reason why people shouldn't work for free is when they would be part of a violation of the law by doing so. Why "albeit unpaid"?

What law are you referring to here? Is it the Fair Labor Standards Act?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Illegal? Which law was being broken? I was looking for a project for my computational physics module. They had a new designer who, on paper at least, was not be as mathematically trained as they would like. My 'A' level physics teacher was the common factor as he had taught us both in the past and knew someone at the engineering firm in question. He suggested the whole work experience thing and I was very grateful to him for thinking of me.As it turned out the designer was perfectly mathematically competent and, like I said, I'm not sure how much I really added. But it was indisputably good experience for me and I'm not sure why you insist on denying that..... Well because I wasn't qualified, had no prior relevant experience and was doing it as part of a project contributing to my degree. In short I was doing unpaid work experience.....They could have taken a different route that didn't involve me at all. The could have spent some money on assessing the mathematical competence of the designer more formally I guess. Or they could have tied up someone more senior as some sort of mathematical chaperone for him. But instead they decided that between the two of us we could be thrown in at the deep end a bit and (with some more flexible support from the senior engineer overseeing us both to make sure we didn't do anything dum) that it would provide both of us with some valuable experience.And it did....

Crashfrog may have missed the point that US law doesn't apply, but in the US there are laws related to free internships. But your project likely would have been a legal unpaid internship in the US.

In the UK it would be the National Minimum Wage (NMW) law, which guarantees a minimum wage for all workers. The latter two aren't reasons you shouldn't be paid, and the first confuses me - if you weren't qualified to do it, how did you do it? If you could do it, how weren't you qualified, and why should your work have been unpaid? Well, did you actually do work or just hang around the office? I mean, if what you're telling me happened is that they let you into the office so you could look around and see engineers at work, that's one thing. That's pretty valuable and that's worth doing. If you're telling me, though, that you produced useful labor product and weren't paid for it, then I think that's something people should avoid doing, in part because it's contributing to the commission of a crime. And like the Joker says, if you're good at something, don't do it for free. Why send the signal that your labor isn't worth anything?