The Internship

In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums asked itself what could be done to improve the accessibility of the zoo and aquarium profession to a broader audience.  One obstacle that was frequently mentioned as a barrier to folks entering the field was the prevalence of unpaid internships.  For many professionals, myself included, these internships were an invaluable resource that allowed me to get some real world work experience, make contacts and obtain professional references, and confirm to myself that this is the field that I wanted to work in.  

I didn't think much about it at the time, but looking back now I realize how lucky I was to be able to do this.  An unpaid internship - in my case in a city where I'd never been before and knew no one - only worked because I had the financial support of my parents.  If I didn't have this support, I don't think I would have been able to do the internship.  And without this internship to give me my experience (to say nothing of the immense amount of volunteer work I'd done before that), I don't know how how successful I would have been in landing my first job as a zookeeper.  Aspiring keepers coming from lower income backgrounds are at a tremendous disadvantage in joining the field (which, to be fair, does a pretty good job of converting you into lower income after you join in).

Yesterday, AZA announced that, starting July 1, it would no longer allow unpaid internship opportunities to be posted on its job board, a site that I tracked religiously both as a college student looking to break into the field, as well as an occasionally-unemployed keeper between jobs.  The responses from keepers I've spoken to have ranged from, "This is huge!" to "Who really cares?," with a few crusty old souls saying it's a bad thing and muttering under their breath about how in their day they had four unpaid internships a week, which they walked to, in the snow, uphill both ways.

To be clear, this isn't the end of unpaid internships in AZA institutions - AZA banning those from member institutions would be a pretty huge step, which perhaps they aren't ready for yet.  To me, it does signify an increasing recognition that, while nice, experience alone doesn't pay bills, and that if you do a day of work, you should get paid for it (though how much of this will result in internships simply being reimagined as volunteering - and no one is talking about getting rid of volunteer departments, though to be fair most volunteers aren't working 20-40 hour weeks).  

Hopefully, it also continues to demonstrate the dismantling of barriers which have kept some potential applicants out of the field.  I've sometimes wondered how many potentially wonderful keepers out there had been passed by over the years, just because they couldn't afford to spend a summer with no pay.