Internship

Intern derives from the French interne, meaning internal or living within. In French medical education, the interne was a student who resided inside the hospital as part of clinical training. The term entered American English in the late nineteenth century with this medical meaning intact. Early American internships were structured residencies in which medical graduates gained supervised clinical experience in hospital wards.

Through the mid-twentieth century, the term remained largely confined to medicine and, to a lesser extent, to teaching, social work, and other fields requiring supervised practical training as a condition of professional licensure. The expansion began in the 1960s and 1970s, when white-collar employers began offering summer positions to college students as a recruitment pipeline. By the 1980s and 1990s, internships had become a standard feature of undergraduate education across business, media, government, and the arts.

The practice of unpaid internships expanded significantly in the 2000s, creating a system in which access to entry-level professional experience often depended on the ability to work without compensation for weeks or months. Critics argued that this effectively restricted career access to those with sufficient financial resources to forgo income. A series of lawsuits in the 2010s, most notably Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2013, challenged the legality of unpaid internships at for-profit companies and prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to revise its guidelines.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that students who completed paid internships received significantly more job offers than those who completed unpaid internships or no internships at all, a finding that reinforced the internship's dual function as both a learning experience and an economic sorting mechanism.