Looking for a summer internship can be incredibly overwhelming. Even with the amazing assistance and guidance from CELS, Connecticut College’s Career Office, it is easy to feel anxious about the process of searching and applying to internships. Her Campus wants to help you!
If you have not met with your CELS counselor, that should be your first step. Your counselor will tailor the process to meet your needs and will help you with everything to secure the best internship. It is never too early to meet with a counselor, so even if you’re a freshman, you should make an appointment. To do so, email Beth Bremmer at bbremmer@conncoll.edu and she will set you up with a counselor. If you want to find out more about the program, you can email Christine Terry, Associate Director of CELS at cjmur@conncoll.edu. There are a number of excellent resources provided through CELS, listed here. Of these, my favorites are Experience, Career Search, and Spotlight on Careers:
Experience: The CELS Office filters and posts jobs and internships in Experience, so this is an especially great resource. In addition to current postings, you can also search through the funded internships that Conn students did during their summer before their senior year! A tip about Experience—even if the posting is not recent, the company could be looking for interns for this year. I found my internship this past summer at Vogue from a posting from 2008. If the company is a place that really interests you, call or do a quick google search to find out if the listed contact person is still in their position.
Career Search: This is a good site that has a lot of different industries covered. In addition to a great internship search site, this site also has “Company Search” and “People Search” features if you already know what you’re looking for and you just need the contact. To search for internships go to Advanced Search and make sure you check “Internships.”
Spotlight on Careers: I like this site because it is a portal for students at selective liberal arts schools. Besides a great internship search engine, this site has articles about networking, building a great resume, and advice from alumnus!
In addition to the amazing resources provided by CELS, there are so many other search engines for internships on the Internet. As overwhelming as the process can be, there are some awesome websites that have great opportunities and can help with the search. Here are some great websites:
Intern Queen: Lauren Berger is the “Intern Queen” and she has used her extensive experience (15 internships during her 4 years of college!) to help students find and apply to internships while providing guidance about how to make the most of your internship. InternQueen has a lot of internships posted from fashion, public relations, and marketing industries. You can also follow her on Twitter!
Internships.com: I was hesitant at first because of the broad title, but this site has proved to be a great resource for me throughout my previous internship searches. Internships.com prides itself on being the world’s largest internship marketplace with 61,560 internship positions from 26,906 companies located in 9,335 cities across all 50 states.
InternSushi: InternSushi is a new website that reinvents the relationship between you and companies. On the site, you can post a video to supplement your resume. InternSushi specializes in internships in hard-to-break-into industries like media and fashion. InternSushi encourages users to “be picky” and requires that employees have updated and complete information about what they do and their internship opportunities.
A quick piece of advice: I would recommend keeping a word document on your computer so you can write down all the username and password combinations for the sites you like. You might just want to have the same information for all of them, but some sites make you put a number in your password or you can have your email as your username for some, so just in case, it is always safe to write them down.
Happy searching!