Experience in meaningful internships give newly-minted college graduates a huge competitive advantage in both the job market and graduate school admissions. But most students (as well as the parents advising them) know almost nothing about securing an internship beyond taking advantage of what is offered by their University’s career office. Below are eight tips to get you on the right track.
Get on LinkedIn
If you are not on LinkedIn, get on. If the content on your LinkedIn profile differs greatly from your resume, you need to update one or both of them. Your LinkedIn profile is your online resume when you are looking. And your LinkedIn account is a fantastic tool to help you find what you are looking for.
When advising my son on his LinkedIn profile, I told him it needed to be a work of art. His profile picture was cropped from a cameo shot his mother had taken that caught him in perfect light outdoors smiling. Too many people either leave their profile picture blank or have a dark, grainy, expressionless mobile phone mug shot. Do not make this common mistake. Next comes the tag line. Which do you think is stronger?
In Pursuit of an ABET-Accredited B.S. Degree in Biomedical Engineering & Relevant Medical Device Industry Experience
Student at ABC UniversityThe former makes one unique and interesting. The latter says the person in question let LinkedIn’s auto-generator write the tag line. Next is the summary. You should use the same text in your LinkedIn Summary that you would put at the top your resume as your Summary / Objective. These are difficult to write. The best ones manage to be general as well as specific, humbly communicate your goals, demonstrate your genuineness, and maybe even show a little bit of your quirkiness. A dry summary is not an option.
Complete your LinkedIn profile by filling out the sections on Education and Experience. You can also put one or two entries under Volunteer Experience & Causes. Be sensitive to your target audience if an entry here touches on religion or politics. There is also an Honors and Awards section. I recommend leaving the Honors and Awards section blank in favor of putting your most meaningful honors and awards as bullet items under either Education or Experience entries as relevant. High School Seniors are often flooded with awards and honors at or near graduation. Do not flood your resume or LinkedIn profile in the same manner. Like your resume, your LinkedIn profile needs to be a concise read. And again, when looking for an internship, the two should look the same.
Identify Your Targets
The Junior I mentored gained an offer from Facebook. But the previous summer he interned at a company whose name you probably would not recognize. The hot medical startup that gave an offer to my son is still in “stealth mode” so you probably would not recognize that company name either. The lesson is simple. It is perfectly acceptable to target top name companies. But you would be greatly limiting your opportunities if you did not find other targets. Depending on your career plans, where you find your targets may vary but here are two great places to start.
The first is LinkedIn. Do a search on people who graduated from your college or university, with your major, living within commuting distance of your home town working in your target industry. If you need to look beyond your home town, pick a metropolitan area where the people in your field work, like Silicon Valley, New York City or Los Angeles—as long as you are willing to live there while interning. The second is Crunchbase. This tool allows you to search for companies that have been funded by venture capital. Beyond that, there may be other sources like industry trade magazines and directories such as Hoovers and InsideView. Try to identify over one hundred companies and put them into a spreadsheet that you will use to rate them as well as track your progress from being a complete stranger to the intern hired.
Build and Leverage Your Network
As an undergraduate, your network includes your peers but does not need to stop there. Be careful about how many people you try to connect with via LinkedIn. But do not be too cautious either. Select people carefully using LinkedIn’s search tools. If a complete stranger whose LinkedIn profile looks interesting to you, ask yourself if that person is likely or unlikely to connect with you on LinkedIn if asked? The closer you are the better. Most people would like to help a struggling undergraduate, as long as they are not being bombarded. My son managed to make almost five hundred relevant LinkedIn connections. Once connected on LinkedIn, then you can see if you can take the connection further.
Understand Your Strengths and Limitations
There is a big difference between rising sophomores and rising seniors. The most prestigious and competitive internships are reserved for rising seniors. But rising sophomores and rising juniors can find excellent internships too. And such internships can be a stepping stone to a more competitive internship the following summer, as was the case for the Junior I was working with in my college’s mentoring program. If you do not need to be paid, you have an advantage. If you need the internship for college credit, this will have either advantages or disadvantages, depending upon where you are applying. Make sure that any training or experience that could possibly be seen as relevant or make you interesting appears on your resume. Both strengths and limitations can operate in your favor. Strengths allow you to be bold and secure an edge. Limitations allow you to be humble if you have the right attitude about them.
Develop a Campaign Strategy
Some businesses have a formal internship program with a defined application process. For these the strategy is simple: follow their instructions and submit a top quality application. But most internships will be found in what is commonly called the hidden job market. You must find them, contact them, qualify if you could add value to their organization as a summer intern, and convince them to hire you. My son secured an unpaid summer internship with an online advertising agency when he was fifteen years old. What did he do? He did online research, and provided his opinion as a teenager when needed. It was how he presented himself when he reached out to the company which otherwise had no plans to take on a summer intern. He reported to the company’s head of operations and generally finished his days early to enjoy the beach which was just a ten minute walk from this very hip agency’s office. It was a fantastic summer for a fifteen-year-old. And it is proof that any student with the tenacity to gain a meaningful experience can get it. To give you an idea of how to develop a campaign strategy, my son’s internship as a rising sophomore is a case in point. And just in case you are wondering, the answer to your question is yes. His father [me] helped him develop his strategy.
After making his LinkedIn profile into a work of art, he began making connections to engineers and HR executives at medical device companies. By selecting highly relevant people, he was rarely rejected. Roughly one third of the people he invited, connected. Once someone connected—and assuming there was not an internship advertised at that person’s company and that he was not already engaged—he followed up with a LinkedIn email with the subject line: Quick Question.
Hi [Contact]. Thank you for connecting via LinkedIn. I hope I am not being too bold asking you this question. Does [your company] ever take on engineering undergraduates for the summer?He sent out around 150 such emails and roughly one in four people replied. Half provided a useless response like, “Yes. Keep an eye on our website.” But the other half engaged wanting to help. The result was that he was able to send a resume and cover letter to the correct person at over fifteen companies that would possibly hire someone with his background and experience for a relevant, unadvertised position—many of which appeared to have been created because he had reached out to them.
The final step in developing a great campaign strategy is crafting an excellent cover letter. Some of the prose in your cover letter will be targeted to the company in question and your cover letter template should set aside sections for custom text based upon what you want to accomplish. These will normally include (a) an opener summarizing how you found the company and got to the point where you were sending the email, and (b) what attracted you to this particular company and department. But rest will be the same in each letter, such as your availability to interview. The most important part of your cover letter will summarize your goals and your flexibility. Here is what my son included in his template.
My goal for the summer of 2014 is to gain meaningful medical device industry experience. To be clear, I do not need financial compensation. I also do not need the scope of my assignment to be full time, last for the entire summer or even to fall strictly within the engineering discipline. I prefer the above of course, but again my primary goal is meaningful industry experience. If there are tasks or projects (even back-burner ones) that can be completed cost-effectively by or with the help of an unpaid or nominally-compensated engineering undergraduate, I’d love to speak with you or whomever would be appropriate to explore the opportunity at [your company].The danger with being too clear on one’s goals is that you can unwittingly rule yourself out. And the danger with being too flexible is that you can appear directionless and fail to command respect. By writing “I prefer the above of course,” my son managed to strike the right balance. He communicated his goals, acknowledged that his expectations were in line with his status as a rising sophomore and lastly communicated his flexibility while commanding respect.
The result was he lined up interviews with seven companies, most of whom met with him during his Spring Break and only one of whom had to cancel. By the end of Spring Break he had two offers. He accepted the best one, and sent a very polite note to the other.
Prepare for Each Interview
There is a late twentieth century proverb worth repeating here. The job does not go to the candidate who is most qualified; instead, the job goes to the candidate who is most prepared. There are two ways in which you must prepare. You must anticipate and prepare for the questions you will be asked in the interview. And you must have meaningful questions to ask during the interview to demonstrate you care and that you are already developing insight into the company and the needs of the people interviewing you. Entire books have been written about how to interview, so I will be brief.
Anticipating their questions involves knowing (i) standard questions like “why are you applying for this job” and (ii) thinking about what you would ask someone interviewing for the internship in question. In preparing for their questions, you need to recall and craft how you would concisely articulate a story from your own experience that supports your answer. Occasionally, interviewers ask questions to see how you think. You cannot prepare for these questions other than by having the discipline not to panic.
Is 4891 Prime? Yikes! Oh I see! (X + a)(X – a) = X^2 – a^2; (70 + 3)(70 – 3) = 4900 -9; The answer is No.
How would you go about estimating how many gas stations are in San Francisco? Hmmm. The population of San Francisco is roughly 850,000. So maybe there are about 500,000 cars. And of course trucks come in and out, so we need to account for those …In preparing your questions, you need to read the LinkedIn profiles of the people who will be interviewing you, search for them in the press and read their quotes and what is said about them. You also need to browse the company website and see what is said about the company in the public domain. Never ask a question when the answer is easily found in the public domain. You should go into the interview with at least five astute questions that are not answered in the public domain that would be meaningful to you. Most if not all should require the interviewer’s perspective, so that you can ask each interviewer the same question without it looking strange when the interviewers compare their notes on you.
Always Thank People
Be sure to email a note of thanks to each person who interviewed you or helped you along the way. Before ending an interview, ask for the interviewer for his or her business card if you have not already exchanged emails. If the person does not have a business card, ask for the person’s email. If the person refuses to provide an email (which is very rare) email someone else and ask that person to pass on your thanks to the person in question.
Have a Solid Backup Plan
Lastly, no matter how well you execute the steps above, it is still possible that you will not receive a single offer. This is why I recommend you have a backup plan. In my son’s case, his backup plan was to take classes during the summer to get ahead on his prerequisites or general education requirements so he could take more electives in the future. The best backup plan will put you in the strongest position possible for the following year. A good backup plan will also reduce the stress you feel when pursuing an internship, especially interviewing. Less stressed, you will perform better throughout the entire process of trying to land an internship, and be less likely to need your backup plan. I wish all of you the best success!
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