Hi everyone! Thanks for coming back to my blog for this week’s post! As you can tell from the title, today’s post is all about how to land your first internship. Since the summer is quickly approaching and we’re starting to think about summer jobs, I thought it would be a perfect topic to tackle this month!
I got my first internship the summer after my sophomore year of college. I’d say that’s relatively early, but I jumped at the chance to gain experience working in my career industry as soon as I could! At James Madison University, my major is Media Arts & Design and my concentration is in Integrated Advertising & Corporate Communication so I was looking for positions either at an advertising agency or a marketing firm and, luckily, that’s exactly what I ended up doing. After the summer was over, I was fortunate enough to intern again over my winter break and I’m so excited to be going back this summer as well. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I have an entire post devoted to talking about my time at the firm linked here, if you’re interested in reading about it!
I’d say the hardest part about getting an internship is knowing where to apply. Search engines like Google aren’t great for putting in random key words like “summer internship.” You’ll get a lot of internship opportunities, but probably not in your field. One of my biggest sources for internships has actually been my professors. In my major, they’re awesome about letting students know what opportunities are out there and giving us the links to apply. I’m also a fan of websites like themuse.com, especially if you’re in the market for a full-time job. The Muse is full of employers looking for young, newly graduated candidates and they give you a nice little snippet of what it would be like to work in each company!
I got my internship through networking. My dad is friends with a man who is in the c-suite of the marketing firm I talked about before and my dad mentioned my major to him and he offered me an internship right away! It was so incredibly nice of him to offer that, and this won’t happen all the time, but the doors just opened for me because my family knew him. Networking is so, so important so if you can just shake hands with important people and make some kind of connection, it will do wonders!
Another tip for getting an internship is making sure your resume is eye-catching and up-to-date. I was taught in high school that a resume needs to be mature and clean and in only black and white. This might be true for other industries, but it’s not for advertising. I’m in a very creative major where graphic design skills are expected and if your resume doesn’t show your eye for design, then you’re off to a bad start. Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly fine to have it in all black and white, but add something – like a personalized logo – that will make your resume stand out to the HR department.
Those are all the tips I have today for landing your first internship; I hope it helped you and your search for a job! If you have any other tips, please leave them in the comments below for other readers to benefit from. See you next week for another post!
