My Experience with the Internship Search, Part I

Oh…the days when finalizing summer plans was as easy as sprawling green sleep-away camps and elaborate beach get-aways. As we near the pinnacle of our academic paths, many ambitious students choose to fill their time-offs with fancy summer internships, valuable opportunities to experience a professional job-site first-hand. Summer internships encourage students to transfer their classroom skills to a professional, real-world environment, one that might mirror their landing, post-college destination. They’re the students’ chance to start tying together their career aspirations, even before they put on that cap and gown.

As parents and career counselors would strongly agree, the value of the summer internship can’t be underestimated. Perhaps this is why, between cramming for tomorrow’s test, student are in a frenzy about finding this golden internship, that blessed chance to bolster the resume and shed light on a future career. Of course, I continue to be among you. That fear of being swamped in rejection letters and “maybe next summer’s” is constantly boiling in my brain, always firmly etched among my other list of stubborn career-related stressors. But, what I’m here to remind you (and what I’ve realized myself) is that landing a summer internship is far from the tearful impossible. It’s stressful, sure, but if you invest sufficient energy into the process, completely and entirely do-able.

Take my experience of locating a summer internship. It all catalyzed last spring around mid-March, after a series of impossible-to-repress versions of “Uh oh, I should start finding an internship, shouldn’t I?” And there were my parents, never hesitant to inform me of yet another college kid with an opportunity up his sleeve. Frantic and without a clue where to start, I did what I considered most reasonable: I phoned Career Services and sought out a career counselor, in hindsight the best decision I could have made. After leaving counselor Donna’s office for the first time, my reaction was this: why on earth hadn’t I done this before? Meeting with Donna alerted me to the ins and outs of this seemingly impenetrable process, one that I had instinctively shied away from. I learned that landing an internship doesn’t happen overnight, or by crossing your fingers for an out-of-the-blue call. It takes being forthright, dedicated, and always-on-your-game--even in the face of obstacle and rejection.

To start, Donna spoke to me in length about my interests and fortes---and how I hope to transfer them to a concrete professional field. That part was easy; I ticked off my academic and personal loves: reading (loads of genres), writing (journalistically, creatively), and interacting with people. I told her of my budding aspirations to write--ideally for a hip, glossy-covered magazine--and use the written word to absorb what’s around me. I also clued her in to my burgeoning interest in publishing, of bringing an author’s personal words to the public light. With my basic fields of interest set-in-stone, Dona sent me home with a host of internship sites: medibistro.com, journalismjobs.com, bookjobs.com, and more. She told me to peruse each site and come back with a list of opportunities that most pique these very interests.

I returned to Donna with a long typed list of professional opportunities that seemed professionally relevant, personally stimulating, and convenient in terms of time frame. A bulk of my red circles came from bookjobs.com, a media site that offers numerous internship opps at top-name publishing companies and literary agencies. Donna and I discussed that I should try my best at some big-name publishing brands, like Kaplan Publishing and Scholastic Inc, along with some smaller agencies, including a small, NY-based agency, Don Congdon Associates.

Then, of course, came the hardest part: prepping my applications. After re-constructing my out-of-date resume and handcrafting a base cover letter, I ran back to Donna’s office for some much-needed criticism. Immediately, my once-white documents transformed into a sea of red scribbles, Xs, and cross-outs. It was exactly what I needed. After a week or so of scouring perfect cover letter openings, (and yelling at Word for misaligning my resume margins), I got Donna’s final seal of approval. Slowly but surely, I started individualizing my cover letters, finalizing my email messages, and pressing the daunting send button.

Stay tuned for Part II of Cara's experience with internship searching...coming soon!