It’s the question you’re going to have heard innumerable times in the first week back: ‘So, what did you get up to this summer?” A few years ago, it might have been a hazy montage of beach holidays, festival revelry and painfully pulling pints at the local pub to pay back the overdraft. But if you didn’t spend your days welcoming in the full moon in Koh Phangan, “finding yourself” in deepest Africa or seeing the beautiful sights and interesting smells of Europe by train, you wouldn’t be the only one.

Many students now see the long vacation as a time when they have to be working just as hard as term time. Many of Cambridge’s best and brightest will have spent the summers building up their CV, interning at companies in their home towns, capital cities and on foreign soil.

So what should we be doing with our much-needed breaks from the Cambridge bubble? You could be forgiven for thinking that by the end of an all-nighter filled year, you deserve a nice long, metaphorical bath of a summer, letting all your tension melt away as you enjoy sangria in sunnier climes, amidst witty conversations not revolving around Moliere.

Shouldn’t a Cambridge degree be enough to look good enough at the end of your three years to land you that dream job? Wouldn’t it be madness to think that you have to work even harder in summer than in term time, impressing potential employers by slaving away for a minimal wage, if any, for merely the possibility of increasing your chances of someday being employed?

According to Gordon Chesterton, the director of the Cambridge Careers Service, we should aim to divide our summers three ways: “A third on yourself, a third on your CV and a third on your course”. Although, in reality, most internships are far longer than a third of a summer; so which of the other two will you dismiss?

The Careers Service is a veritable goldmine of information that we should really be told about as soon as we set foot in the hallowed halls of our colleges. Listing every kind of job under the sun, offering practice interviews and skills tests, organising casual careers evenings.

But the first obstacle is knowing what we want to do, let alone how to go about finding a way of experiencing it. For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to be doing a vocational degree (i.e. Law or Medicine), the idea of spending our summer slaving away in an unknown field can be a daunting one. You could follow Michael Warshafsky’s example, and shadow sixty professionals in just under two months, as tracked in his ‘Sixty in Sixty’ blog. Although that is perhaps a bit extreme, even for the most dedicated of CV fillers.

Most will pick their internships on the strength of varying ties to their degree: placements at newspapers, publishing houses and humanitarian organisations for Arts students; banks and consultancy firms for Economists; and research labs for scientists and mathematicians. There are hundreds of options out there waiting to be explored: if only it could be more ‘Try before you Buy” rather than ‘Work for us and we will then be your only escape from graduate unemployment”.

Anything and everything from law vacation schemes to shadowing MPs to saving the world one Red Cross placement at a time, these internships make it difficult for the general public to continue to call students lazy. Take vac schemes as an example: the average three week placement will involve long and taxing days dredging up that supervision reading from two terms ago, even longer nights demonstrating your ability to hold your drink in front of clients and thus making yourself seem an appealing employment prospect, and a gruelling interview at the end of it.

The same goes for most City internships, not only do you have to show that you can take the hours chained to your desk, you have to be able to play hard too, proving that you’re not just another clever c(l)og in the machine.

However let’s not bring out the violins too soon, as at least there you’re getting fairly recompensed. The average weekly City intern wage sits at around £350 per week, plus all the cushy client dinners and “team-building” cocktail-making classes. At other, less profitable institutions, you’d be lucky to be reimbursed your travel expenses, and between one third and one half of internships are completely unpaid.

One national newspaper, surely capable of winging a few pounds towards a poor student, will only shell out for expenses within Zone Six, leaving hundreds of thousands of students, not able to afford to live in London for the summer, without the means to take up the opportunity of a placement.

What’s more, as the number of people applying for work experience increases, it is becoming harder and harder to come by in the most sought-after fields; so much so that one hears evil rumours running through the intern world. At the uber private Conservative Party’s ‘Black and White’ party, five City internships were sold off, raising £14,000 (for the Party, not for charity) in the process and giving equal opportunities a fairly undisguised two-fingered gesture.

Luckily for us, Cambridge offers forty £500 bursaries to anyone doing an unpaid internship in which they “contribute to the workplace”, which one can only assume is open to quite loose interpretation. A sizeable sum, but still not enough to pay for rent, feed you and get you to work in London, Manchester or Bristol for more than two weeks at a push.

So, with uncertain job prospects, a huge discrepancy in the wages between firms and little recognition of your efforts, is it worth spending six weeks brown-nosing and falling asleep at the photocopier? Does the world not need more rounded, travelled and ‘life experienced’ individuals rather than an army of over-worked and underpaid interns?

As the Careers Service are so keen to point out, it’s all about finding the right balance and enjoying experiencing things that you’ve never done before, even if at the end of it, all you’ve got to show for it is either another line on your CV or another city crossed off your ‘To Visit’ list.  Better to have spent your summer enjoying sun, supervision reading and a serious slob than return to Cambridge a leathery beach bum with a new found admiration for Buddhism or an overworked shadow of your former self, even before term begins.