TechNews STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SINCE 1 928 McCormick Tribune Campus Center Room 221 3201 South State Street Chicago, Illinois 60616 E-mail: editor@technewsiit.com Website: http://www.technewsiit.com TechNews STAFF Editor-in-Chief Kori Bowns Opinion Editor Austin Gonzalez Sports Editor Nathan McMahon IT Manager Pranava Teja Surukuchi Copy Editors Travon Cooman Kristal Copeland Kapeel Daryani Shireen Gul Anoopa Sundararajan Layout Editors Rachael Affenit Amy Czarkowski Marc Sednaoui Sijia Wu Distribution Manager Khaleela Zaman Financial Advisor Faculty Advisor Vickie Tolbert Gregory Pulliam MISSION STATEMENT Our mission is to promote student discussion and bolster the IIT community by providing a newspaper that is highly accessible, a stalwart of journalistic integrity, and a student forum. TechNews is a dedicated to the belief that a strong campus newspaper is essential to a strong campus community. 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ADVERTISING Legitimate paid advertisements, from within or outside the IIT community, which serve to produce income for the paper, are accommodated. TechNews holds the right to deny any advertisement unsuitable for publication. Media Kits are available upon request. Ad space is limited and is taken on a first-come, first-serve basis. Contact the Business Manager at business@ technewsiit.com for more information. LOCAL Er NATIONAL ADVERTISERS To place an ad, contact us via email at business@technewsiit.com. TechNews | Tuesday, August 26th, 2014 Internships provide worthwhile experiences Kyle Stanevich BUSINESS MANAGER After my freshman year at Illinois Tech, I was unsure whether or not an internship was right for me. I didn’t feel that I had learned the necessary skills that would permit me to be of any use to a company other than sweeping the floors and fetching people coffee. I had mentally postponed my internship shopping until next summer. However, an internship fell into my lap without even applying (and with a little good luck.) At the start of 2013, my father, a mechanical engineer, was on the hunt for a new job. He finally picked one up in San Diego with a little known company called Autosplice. Their niche in the automotive industry lies in making little connectors that attach the internal electronics of cars. Since my father now lived in San Diego, it was decided that I would spend my free time over there, enjoying the nice weather and going to the beach every day. Upon being picked up from the San Diego Airport, my father returned to work with me in tow to finish up his day. I spent my first few hours touring the oflice and introduced myself to anyone still there Friday afternoon. Upon finishing my self-guided tour, I was approached by the boss with a question, “When do you start?” I had no resume, no interview, a t-shirt and plaid shorts, and I was asked to start working. This was quite a shock to me, and before he could change his mind, I accepted and shook his hand. Skip ahead a few weeks and I am now engineering in full. I’m running tests, CADing up parts to be machined, doing write- ups, sending reports to customers, presenting conclusions to the company leaders, and even running computer simulations on products. All of this was done with very minimal engineering knowledge and some simple physics and intuition. Maybe at another company, I would need to know a bit more, but I could have quit school right there and started working full—time as an engineer. However useless extra school might seem, it does come with its benefits, the main one being the pay. With a bachelor’s degree, it becomes easy to be making 3 times what an intern does, with only room to grow. Plus, all this extra knowledge bring with the ability to never be stumped. My advice to incoming students is to put themselves out there. Try getting a job above your level of education. Stay in school and get a good degree. Don’t just dress nice and have a polished resume, but be with your soon-to—be boss like they were your friends. What do you have to lose? Money you’re not making? Experience you’re not getting? A resume without an internship on it? Post-scarcity society approaches Austin Gonzalez OPINION EDITOR Someone proposed to me that the time of the scarcity-based economy is coming to an end. With 3D laser scanners and print- ers growing in popularity and accessibility, the value of buying pre—made things from a store or online distributer will be less than the conve- nience of printing whatever you want whenever you want. Break a glass? Scan the fragments and print a new one in minutes. Need an expensive and rare part for your car? Find the plans and print it for less. Food and organs have even been created using the most advanced biological 3D printers. Once we all have 3D printers we will all become pirates for printing spoons and circum- navigating an economic world based on scarcity. I think that we can take this one step further and say that the first world already exists in a largely post—scarcity economy, especially through digi- tal goods and services. A basic view of value is based largely on the idea that there is a limited amount of stuif in the world to have. Supply and demand, for example, is a concept everyone is familiar with; rare things are expensive things, and plastic, mass-produced things arecheap things. When you buy a handmade chair you can see the time business@technewsiit.com put into the end result. You are buying a quan- tized amount of skill, labor, and material. You’ve bottled up a part of someone’s life and now own it, and there’s nothing quite like it. But the things we buy and make today are largely produced, at least in part, by machines without human labor. Digital goods can be copied and re- sold. Your chair has no uniqueness because it can be replicated over and over (in exacting de— tail) and then sold again. The upshot of this is that your life’s work can be enjoyed and utilized by everyone and you aren’t limited to a single masterpiece you must make individually again and again. The downside is using a model which expects quantized uniqueness in everything is that it is difficult and confusing to place an ob- jective value on it. Scarcity is not something we have to deal with and hasn’t been for a while. Take for instance music; radios have made it so that ev— eryone can have music all the time. For better or for worse, you literally hear the same exact song again and again with zero impact on its ability to be used again. The product you receive is not noticeably valuable in the sense that we are accustomed. To a lesser extent, mass-made goods fall into a similar category. Once upstart costs are paid, reproducing an exact copy of a cup or chair is a matter of letting the thing run. My buying of the cocoa brown Strind Ikea table business@technewsiit.com has very minimal effect on your ability to buy the exact same thing. Imagine this. You need that spoon I mentioned earlier, because you’ve lost yours. I’ve got the same spoon you want so you figure to call up your buddy Austin, have him scan it and send you the 3D model to be printed. Congratulations, you have just digitally pirated a physical object. For the industrial giants and mega corporations the revenue generation of a spoon will move from selling a physical good to, in a sense, licensing the model to be made by the consumer. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where if there’s something you need you can Google it and print it in a matter of minutes? These complications are essentially what com— panies are currently trying to cope with when one person copies a CD and sends it to friend to have burned to a CD. Scarcity is not a challenge we face too often. Our digital, mass—production capable world bends our economic understanding of value, space, and time. When you buy a movie, game, or program you’ve literally bought noth- ing (aside from a few properly placed electrons) and certainly not anything unique. We enjoy a world of post-scarcity for digital goods and that might as well extend to mass produced goods as well. business@technewsiit.com