As I embark on my first internship, I am realizing how tedious, stressful and long the journey of finding one and completing the startup process can be. From interviews and rejection letters, to training and filling out documents, it almost feels like you’ll never get started. However, this is essential to finding the internship that best fits your style and study area. Here are some tips for finding an internship, including where to look and how to start planning ahead.
An internship is essentially a job; sometimes paid, sometimes for school credits, and sometimes purely for volunteer purposes. It is also an experience where you will learn more about what you’re looking to do after school, if what you had in mind is really what you want, or if you want to take a different route. Although it sounds scary and like a step back, it’s what separates an internship from a job. It’s an opportunity to look ahead to your future and see how you feel about it.
There’s different ways of going about looking for internships. You can search online (Indeed, LinkedIn, Handshake, etc.) or you can ask faculty members for opportunities that they might have or know of. While looking online is the easiest, most accessible way, don’t disregard asking around since faculty members have connections and might know you as a student and know what would fit you best. Similarly, you might want to reach out to the director of the department of your preference letting them know who you are and what they’re looking for. When you do this, from my experience, it is best to write the email as your cover letter and attach a professional resume. It is very important that you have someone read it over, preferably an advisor, professor, or mentor. You can choose either route, but you can also choose all of them and have more opportunities! Even though that might sound like a lot, it’s better to have ones to choose from rather than conforming yourself to one spot.
Once you have an internship, consider setting up a meeting and asking about the training process, documents to fill out, and accesses to have. These are all things that, from experience, take a little while to get settled and it’s best if you have all the information ahead of time. With this, you can work on what you need on your side–whether it’s documentation to fill out, vaccines to get, or offices to visit–and give your site’s office time to prepare their things for you. Then when it comes time to work, you can start right away and take advantage of your time.
As I said, finding an internship can be just as difficult as finding a job. However, I would consider it essential to develop your career decisions and even more essential to be prepared for the process of what it’s like to get there. It all sounds scary, dreadful and long now, but once you are on your feet and learning from professionals in your field of choice, you will be glad you went through the work to get that internship.