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I subscribe to several (computer) games journalists on Twitter, and one week in January I read tweets from them regarding a contest by a popular games magazine. Writers would submit their best articles and the winner would be given a permanent space on the magazine's blog to write about games. The winner would write for a while, get noticed, and be hired for paid work somewhere else, so the premise is. The tweets questioned the correctness of publishing the winner's writings without paying him. Later, Jim Rossignol John Walker, games writer for the website Rock Paper Shotgun had written an article on the topic. I had thought little of it other than to hope that Twitter users could stop the magazine from promoting the contest, or sway the magazine to turning it into a paid job.

Later that month, I thought about my job at an independent pharmacy in town. For about two years it was an unpaid volunteer position. I saw a slight parallel with the hypothetical writer. How fair was I treated to work without pay, doing the same tasks as a technician? How about other students in the faculty who might have also begun their jobs in the same way? I've always appreciated my employer for giving me a chance and hiring me, years before I ever started pharmacy school. But then that's exactly why, that's exactly where the parallels end.

The aforementioned hypothetical contest winner would not be new to writing and are likely well-practiced, at least not if they were deemed the best of all the entries. They could easily be professional  writers, or good enough to be professional. If the magazine thought that the costs of having a guest contribute to their blog outweighed the benefits to their business (i.e. very good articles), there would be no contest. The magazine thought that they could hire a new blog editor at no cost.

On the other hand, I was hired minus any training. I was hired as a volunteer under great liability to my boss, as I wasn't affiliated with the College of Pharmacists and was essentially being trained on the job. I wasn't immediately given tasks related to filling prescriptions, but I was eventually. It's benefited me massively in both not walking into practice lab unprepared, and not having to outright pay for my own training/certification as a technician.