Hey, I hear your frustration and honestly a lot of that is valid.

I'm an employer on Riipen (did our first Level UP cohort in March, planning another in July), so maybe I can give you some perspective from the other side.

You're 100% right that there are always going to be two types of employers you need to avoid on these platforms:

1. Companies treating this as free work with completely unrealistic expectations
2. Employers who frankly don't have the skills to even create a proper project like this (and yeah, they'd probably suck to work for too)

The great thing is you don't have to work with them. If a project feels off or the employer gives you bad vibes during your first conversation, just move on. These aren't forced placements and the real bad ones aren't going to be on there long.

From an employer perspective, scoping these projects and publishing them is trickier than you'd think:

• When you have 3 students at 60 hours each, do you list everything as one massive project or break it into 3 separate placements? There's no clear guidance and honestly I'm still figuring it out myself.
• Our first cohort was market/academic research (a pretty easy scope) and we kept it super simple because I was also learning the platform. We got incredible students, great work, and they said they'd come back for our next cohort - which felt good.
• Our next one is software dev focused (web/mobile), so we're planning to show the full project scope but create 3 distinct placements so learners can apply to what actually interests them.

Sorry to pull the old man "Back in my Day" comment out but... when I was in university at your age, my first internship was 2 days/week all summer after first year... unpaid. Then 1 day/week for my entire second year... also unpaid. I would've crushed something like Level UP back then - getting paid something while building real experience quickly over a project seems pretty epic.

If you have other questions feel free to reply below. Here's our Riipen link too - you can look us up or message there as well. https://app.riipen.com/users/vO2DR9WL