Students on UCL’s blundering flag- ship degree, the ‘interdisciplinary’ Arts & Sciences, are demanding a formal apology after they were forced to spend their sum- mers undertaking compulsory intern- ships - many of which were unpaid.
The department is said to have told its undergraduates that a failure to com- plete a compulsory internship - which in a number of cases meant working for free and without expenses - would mean that were not able to progress to the next year of their degree or graduate.
The Arts & Sciences Department itself took on an intern as part of the scheme. They were only paid National Minimum Wage, despite its excessive spending on luxury items. Its ‘Doughnuts with the Director’ event has cost an eye-water- ing £16k over its current lifetime. The weekly £320 spend on ‘gourmet sour- dough’ Crosstown Doughnuts, which are stocked in Selfridges, equates to a week of work paid at London Living Wage rates.
While some students were fortunate enough to have their wage covered by a college bursary scheme, others were let down. Third-year Becky Mumford worked without pay. “I wasn’t expect- ing to get paid by a small NGO but some internships were funded by UCL, others not. I’d love to know why they valued my friend’s internship in an art gallery over mine and others at an NGO. I just hate the idea of someone at UCL pass- ing judgement over what work is deemed worthy of pay and what isn’t”.
Those who were paid under the bur- sary scheme received the National Mini- mum Wage for under-21s £5.03 an hour - just over half the London Living Wage Many of the third year BASc students who spoke to The Cheese Grater said that they would not have completed their in- ternships had were it not for the depart- ment’s threats of denying them gradua- tion. This left many with no choice but to work unpaid after term had ended for the required six weeks.
One said that they would have been “better off doing bar work” and they “got nothing” out of their compulsory placement. Evangelising the scheme on its website, UCL say that through it “stu- dents will gain a better understanding of their skills and be more able to market themselves successfully to potential fu- ture employers”.
In a staff-student meeting, representa- tives of the year group asked for a formal apology. They were told, however, that this would not be possible as the de- partment had spent around £25,000 on scheme.