Your Internship Might Be Rung One of Twenty

Sponsored by

I'm 63 With $1.5M. Can I Spend $10K a Month?

You’ve saved $1.5 million. Now comes the real test.

Can it produce $10,000 a month, or will that pace drain your portfolio?

Most retirees do not get a clear answer until it is too late.

The issue is not just how much you have. It is whether your portfolio was built to pay you, not just grow.

That difference can determine whether your money lasts decades or starts breaking down early.

Sequence of returns, taxes on withdrawals, healthcare costs, and whether the 4% rule still applies all play a role.

Fiduciary advisors created a breakdown showing what drives sustainable income and why the same $1.5M can produce very different outcomes.

If you have $1M or more invested, do not guess.

See How Long My Money Lasts

Learn More

Welcome to today's SCALIS EarlyCareers newsletter! 🚀

In 2002, a college kid took a sales internship with the Buffalo Bisons, a Triple-A baseball club in western New York. He earned a full-time seat the next season. This month, approaching his 19th year with the organization, Anthony Sprague was named General Manager, only the third in the club's modern Triple-A era and the 20th in a 136-year history. He never left. He just kept climbing the same ladder.

Read that in 2026 and it sounds like a story beamed in from another century. The average worker in their first five years now changes jobs roughly once a year, and even the neutral numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics put workers aged 25 to 34 at a median of about 2.7 years per job. "Stay two decades and climb to the top" reads like a fossil.

But look at why young workers actually leave, and the story flips on you. It is not disloyalty. Survey after survey lands on the same finding: second only to pay, the top reason people leave early roles is a lack of any visible path forward where they are. They quit because the ladder is missing, not because they refuse to climb one.

Which means the Sprague path is not dead. It is rare, and it is a decision you make at the front door, before you ever accept the offer. You can figure out whether an internship leads to a real ladder or a dead end dressed up as a resume line. Today is about spotting that difference while you are still a candidate.

Wake Up Smarter About AI.

The president of OpenAI. The CEO of Google. The founder of LinkedIn. We talk to the people building AI. Every morning, we put what they told us in your inbox.

What they're actually worried about. What they're betting on. What's coming next. Delivered in five minutes, before your first meeting.

With one email, and only five minutes, you can stay ahead of 99% of the world.

Join 75K Readers →

3,361 new internship positions freshly posted today. View the full list below and start applying!

Pull up the leadership page before you fall for the perks page

Every company sells interns on the same things: culture, free lunch, "high-impact projects." None of that tells you whether you can build a career there. The org chart does. Before you apply, open the company's leadership team on LinkedIn and check one thing: how many of the people at the top started near the bottom. A VP of sales who joined as a coordinator. A director who has been there eleven years. A GM who started as an intern. That is a company that moves its own people up.

If every senior leader was hired in from the outside in the last three years, the internal ladder is decoration. You would be applying to be a rung someone else climbs over, not a person who gets to climb.

Ask the question almost no candidate asks

In interviews, most interns ask about day-to-day work or "growth opportunities," and get a rehearsed answer. Ask something they can only answer with facts:

This is a different question from "what percent of your interns get offers." Conversion tells you whether you get hired. This tells you whether you can rise. A company with a real internal ladder answers with names and stories, because they are proud of it. A company without one gives you a number-free non-answer and pivots to the mission statement. That evasion is the data.

Know which industries reward staying, and which punish it

Not every field pays off tenure the same way. Businesses built on institutional knowledge and relationships (sports organizations, manufacturers, insurers, utilities, hospital systems, long-held family companies) tend to promote from within and reward the person who knows where everything is buried. Others treat early-career staff as interchangeable and refill the seat every cycle.

The retention data backs this up: manufacturing and public-sector roles show far higher tenure than retail or fast-moving professional services, largely because they build real ladders and anchor them with benefits. When you choose where to intern, weigh this the way you weigh pay. A slightly less shiny logo with a genuine path can out-earn a prestige name that spits you back out in eighteen months.

Do not confuse loyalty with strategy

Here is the trap the Sprague story can set for you. Staying is not automatically smart. Job-hopping became the default for a real reason: for years, switching companies was the fastest way to raise your pay and title, while loyal employees quietly got passed over. In a dead-end job, that is still true.

So do not romanticize the two-decade climb. Interrogate it. The internship is your test-drive: ten or twelve weeks to learn from the inside whether this is a place that builds people or parks them. If it parks them, you leave with a resume line and zero regret. If it builds them, you may have just found your ladder. Loyalty is a feeling. This is a strategy.

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

You don't have to scroll every AI thread, track every new tool, or watch every demo. 

The Rundown AI breaks it all down for you — the latest AI news, tools, and tutorials in one free 5-minute email every morning. 

Trusted by 2M+ professionals at Apple, Google, and NASA.

Sign up to start learning.

The compounding you give up every time you restart

There is a quiet cost to hopping every year that no offer letter shows you. When you stay and climb, you compound things a job-hopper resets each time: the trust of people who have watched you deliver, the institutional knowledge that makes you faster than any outside hire, the reputation that gets you pulled into the important rooms.

Sprague did not become GM because he stuck around. He became GM because nineteen years of compounded relationships and hard-won knowledge made him the obvious choice when the seat opened. You cannot fake that in a good interview. The takeaway for a seeker is not "never leave." It is this: when you find a place with a real ladder, understand that the climb is an asset that grows the longer you are on it, and let that shape where you point your applications right now, this cycle, before you commit a summer to anyone.

When the ladder turns out to be a dead end

Sometimes you will do all the homework and discover the prestige internship you wanted leads nowhere internally. Take it anyway if you need the credential, but go in clear-eyed: treat it as a launchpad, not a home, and spend the summer building the relationships that let you jump.

And when you find the rarer thing, a place where the intern really can become the boss, recognize what you are looking at. In a market where everyone is coached to keep moving, the person who finds the right place to stand and climb has an edge almost no one is using.