When university keeps you busy all week, all day and all night, it seems legit that you don’t have time to get an internship, let alone a paid one. But what about during summer? Could you sacrifice la playa for some exciting skyscrapers?
This week’s Campus Cutie is Yannic, editor of City Journalism students’ website stjohnstreet.net. Yannic is going to spend an awesome summer in NYC where he got an internship. How did he get it? Let’s hear it from him!
Name: Yannic Rack
Major & Year of study: BA Journalism, 2nd year
Country of origin: Germany
Relationship status: In a relationship
How did you get your internship in NYC? I wrote them and called them up, as simple as that. It actually took only about 24 hours until they told me I could go there for 3 months – you always expect it to be much harder than it actually is!
What do you expect? Lots of experience and hopefully some useful contacts. I think that’s what anyone expects from work experience.
Do you think it is more important to study or to build up your CV when at uni? It depends on how much you need to study, but of course both are sort of required. I personally put experience before studying, but I also make sure that my academic performance is still satisfactory, of course.
Most challenging part of your experience as editor? I don’t know if there’s a real challenging part. I enjoy doing it so it comes naturally, I guess. But it is more time-consuming than you’d think, that’s probably what I didn’t expect at the beginning.
What would you say to students on how to get the perfect internship? I think the best advice I can give is this: decide what you want to do, then make a list of what you think is possible to achieve (for example, as an undergrad with no experience on a national level, I won’t go for the NY Times – that’ll just bring me down) and simply contact people directly. In my experience you ALWAYS think it’s harder than it actually turns out to be.
You’re in London. Your girlfriend is abroad. How do you guys make this work? It’s definitely straining at times and I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s not impossible. She’s only abroad for one year, so that makes it a lot easier because you know it’ll be over soon. I still thank God for Skype every day though.