Students

How to get an internship

Internships are won on timing and specificity more than on grades. Both of those are things you control.

1. The calendar beats the CV.

   Large graduate and internship schemes open six to twelve months ahead and fill on a rolling basis. A good application in October beats an excellent one in March, because in March the seats are gone.

2. Apply to fewer places, properly.

   Ten researched applications will beat sixty copied ones. The scattergun is visible from the other side, and it reads as someone who wants any job over this one.

3. Smaller companies are the underrated route.

   Everyone applies to the twenty names they can list from memory. A fifty-person company in your city has fewer applicants, more actual responsibility, and a manager who will remember you.

4. Ask for the thing that does not exist yet.

   Plenty of small firms have never run an internship and would take a good one if it arrived pre-packaged. Propose the scope, the dates and what you would deliver. You are removing their work, not adding it.

5. Your lecturers are a network you are ignoring.

   They consult, they have former students in industry, and they are asked for recommendations constantly. Almost no student ever asks them directly.

6. Make one thing you can show.

   A small finished project you can open on a laptop shortens every conversation. Finished and modest beats ambitious and half-built, every time.

7. Apply to the ones you think are out of reach.

   Criteria are written as an ideal, and panels routinely take people who missed a line of it. The application you talk yourself out of has a zero per cent success rate.

8. Be explicit about your dates.

   “Available from 2 June for twelve weeks” removes a question that otherwise gets you filed under ‘follow up later’ and forgotten.

9. Treat the rejection as data.

   If twenty applications produce no first-round interviews, the CV is the problem. If interviews produce no offers, the room is the problem. Those are different fixes.

10. Say yes to the unglamorous one.

    The internship that gets you doing real work at an unfashionable company is worth more than a famous logo where you shadow somebody. Nobody senior confuses the two.