How to Find Internships for College Students
As a college student, I have had some success obtaining internships in my desired field of study which is law. On a college university campus there are a lot of ways of finding out about internships. The most basic way is to scan the billboards and your email accounts and look out for any job or internship openings. Being on a list serve such as pre-law, pre-med, or pre-health can be very helpful because the advisor for that department will usually send out informative emails about companies or places that are hiring interns for the spring, summer, or winter sessions.
Another great way is by going to the Career Development Center on your college campus. Almost every university campus has this Career Development Center which is a very helpful place to find a job or internship. The Career Development Center holds onto your resume and cover letter for you as well as letters of recomendation from employers and professors. This creates a file for you that they keep track of. You simply tell the Career Development Center the names of Companies or places that you want to send your reference letters, cover letter, or resume and they will send it out for you. This creates confidentiality from an employer’s standpoint because the Career Development Center is a well known place around the nation that is geared toward helping college students.
Another great site is the Off Campus College website. This website is usually created through your university that helps enormously with finding internships and jobs. This site will post all the names and companies of employers looking for interns of job applicants to fill positions. On the site you can search by category such as law or government and searches pertaining to your query will pop up. The website will also give you the contact information of these employers including their name, profession, phone number, email address and where to find out more information about the position. The one feature that I have found that the site lacks is the date that the applications are due for each of these various sites.
The Off Campus College site does tell you if the internship or job is for the summer, spring or winer session but there is ambiguity about the date that the application is due. However I would strongly recommend anyone interested in a job on the website to call the employer to find out more information.
The final method for obtaining internship jobs is through networking. I have found networking extremely helpful and I have obtainied several internships using this method. Networking requires that you tell all of your friends and relatives that you are looking for a job or internship. I would even go so far as to give them a copy of your resume to hold onto. Your family members and friends know people through business or personal relationships and can give you that connection you need to get that job.
