Our guest blogger this week is Michelle Rick of the FosterCityPatch.

This week I'll be diving into the chilly bay waters of unpaid internships, otherwise known as free labor, otherwise known as the way it is. An unpaid internship is basically swapping work for a line on your resume and experience (cute little anecdotes you can mention in job interviews).

The National Association of Colleges and Employers also reported that 50% of graduating students reported having held an internship in 2008. That statistic was 17% in 1992.

Anyone who says you can't put a price on experience clearly never paid $42,500 to work at Vogue – unpaid, although I suppose if you can afford to pay that price, money is only an afterthought. The Huffington Post and Vanity Fair were the respective runners up, at $9,000 and $2,900 through an auction by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

"It seems to me that for-profits are now using interns in place of employees and this violates federal wage and hour rules," Martha West, a UC Davis School of Law professor specializing in labor law saidin this article. "Because of the recession, companies are more interested in getting free help."

The media industry is notoriously one of the worst offenders when it comes to paying their interns. You can work at just about any company you can think of – Viacom, Time Warner, Universal – so long as you are a currently enrolled college student who takes their compensation in the form of credit hours.

A sweet spot for those interested in scoring a big-name internship is an urban Mecca like New York City. Still, even if you manage to unearth a paid internship, rent and living expenses will likely have you paying for the experience to work.

There are six criteria that an unpaid internship is supposed to meet in order to be under official compliance with the United States Department of Labor. This fact sheet, released in April, breaks it down in the common man's English.

"How the company or the interns saw this as anything other than slave labor was beyond me. I think the unpaid internship situation has gotten completely out of hand, and I've been waiting for the government to address this issue for some time now. I'm so happy this is finally being addressed," Neal Conan said on the July 13 show of NPR's Talk of the Nation. One of the more interesting lines in the fact sheet is the following: "Further, unpaid internships generally should not be used by the employer as a trial period for individuals seeking employment at the conclusion of the internship period." You can only imagine how many employers are blunt about the fact that their offered internships serve this very purpose – to scout for the truffles and leave the weeds to their own devices.

In their 2009 Experimental Education Survey, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that two out of every three students with internships were offered full-time employment from the same company in the 2007 to 2008 academic year.

"If they complain that I should be paid for this internship, you can imagine how hard it might become next year and the year after, when this intern is applying for real jobs in the movie industry, and people have heard that this guy is a troublemaker, or this woman is a troublemaker, and let's not hire, you know, this intern," said Steven Greenhouse, a Labor and Workplace Correspondent for the New York Times, when he was a guest on Conan's show.

"If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free. In fact, the transition to full time status results in the addition of only one new responsibility: feeling superior to the new interns," jokes the infamous Stuff White People Like blog.

Among my regrets in college was the fact that I boarded the internship train later than I should have. Aside from connections, experience is the most helpful tool a job contender can have these days.

I did, however, hold one unpaid internship that undoubtedly met the requirements outlined by the Department of Labor. Having done the undergrad line dance in Davis, Sacramento was naturally my Mecca for an internship. After watching The War Room, I decided I could totally be the next James Carville (aka "The Ragin' Cajun") and went to work for a gubernatorial candidate. My supervisors specifically asked me what I was interested in learning and made it clear they wanted me to be able to make the most out of this internship.

I admit, I was lucky to work with such understanding and thoughtful people. I stuffed a whole lot of envelopes, but I also can say I have experience with social media, which is apparently the new big thing. I acknowledge that you take the good in with the bad. And, at the very least, you can always filch a whole lotta pens for compensation.