>From your family's standpoint, the pay you received was probably immaterial compared to value of the experience. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehen

>From your family's standpoint, the pay you received was probably immaterial compared to value of the experience. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I have any sort of access to my parents' money. My bank account contains only what I've earned (and been given over the years at e.g. my bar mitzvah, though most of that was depleted by paying for a year of college, and that's only because of a roughly 450% return over 7 years...my dad managed my "portfolio" very well for me, which is a benefit I will admit a lot of people don't have). >What if you had received two internship offers one summer: (1) A boring but well-paid position, and (2) a really exciting/enriching opportunity that didn't even pay enough to cover your living expenses? Would your family have forced you into #1, or would you have been subsidized for #2? The situation didn't come up, so it's hard to say. I studied something with practical and relatively lucrative applications (CS) rather than stuff like classics (actually, now that I mention it a good undergrad friend of mine had a full ride scholarship because of her family's financial situation, and she majored in classics). If it had come up, well, I'm sure there's a point at which making an extra $1-2k on the summer wouldn't be worth the experiential opportunity cost, but I primarily worked to make money, and would have balked at an internship that didn't even pay my living expenses. Believe me, the educational benefit of grading 400 proofs every week, half of them written by symbolic systems sophomores, suffers from very steep diminishing returns.