How to find a summer internship – a newbie’s guide
You most likely have landed on this page as you got a link in your email either in response to your email to Internshala or your internship query in Internshala’s comments section. And you are wondering why?
Have a look at the title of the post, that may give you a clue. Basically your query helped us determine that in order to help you best, we needed to help you with some fundamentals first. The basics of internship hunt, without which you may be losing out to competition. If you are wondering what made us believe that you needed help with foundation, check if you did any of the following…
1. You sent a very generic “I need internship” query – Well, who doesn’t. But filling pages with this request is not going to help. is it? ALL the internships that Internshala comes across, are posted right here on this portal. Surf around and apply to those which interest you.Its not as if we have kept a few of them hidden from public view that we only reveal to those who write these generic emails to us.
Please make extensive and intelligent use of the search box given on top of right hand side bar – more often than not you would find what you are looking for.
If you are not able to find the internship you are looking for, would recommend that you subscribe to get future notifications in case something interesting comes up. But please trust us when we say that EVERY internship that we know is posted right here.
However, if you have any specific query or are looking for any additional information that is not provided here, please feel free to write to us about it.
2. You are a Chemical (replace is with your branch) Engineer and you sent us an email requesting an internship at Internshala – This clearly shows you have no clue what Internshala is and why are you even applying to us. Please spend some time researching about an organization before hitting the “send” button on email. Email writing takes times, don’t waste it writing irrelevant emails.
3. You sent us an email with a copy-paste cover letter – I quote from http://www.deeds.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/jobs/internship.html
“Generic and gushing statements on how wonderful science is, how distributed/OS/SW/embedded systems is what you’ve always wanted to do research in and at what early age your burning desire to pursue Computer Science manifested itself is (sometimes) amusing to read; unfortunately the more such content-free poetic ramblings I see in your application or emails, the less attention I will devote to your application!”
Please get the message, if you are not willing to make an effort for your internship, no one else will.
3. You sent us an email with just your resume attached and no introduction, no cover letter, at times nothing mentioned even in the subject line – Seriously? If you can not even take the pain of writing a few lines introducing yourself, and your interest in the company, do you expect recruiters to take the pain of opening the document and deciphering what was your intention in sending it? It’s YOUR career and YOU have to make the efforts to make it a successful one.
4. You sent us an email or a comment full of SMS language (u, plz, bro, dat, ur, nytime, ma etc.) – However friendly Corporate World may seem, it still sticks to conservative old fashioned English where people write complete sentences with words spelled as they are spelled in the dictionary. These are business managers and HR honchos you are writing to, NOT your college buddies – some professionalism please!
5. Your email/comment was in poor English (spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, ill formed sentences etc.) – This is something that you can not perhaps help much but we’d like to let you know that if this is the same quality of emails that you are writing to recruiters, chances that you would hear back are ZERO. Spend some time reading an English daily, take help of your teachers, try to converse with friends in English and hopefully that would add a lot to your self-confidence
6. Your comment against a post showed that you had not read the post completely – Most common of these are students asking “How to apply for this internship” or applying for an internship in the comments section of a post instead of at the link given in the post. Again, this is YOUR internship and YOUR career, please make an effort and read the post completely. If you still don’t, you will keep coming back to this page.
7. You asked a similar doubt in the comments section that has already been asked by someone else and answered – Again, spare yourself the effort of writing and invest that effort in reading the post and the comments completely. If you still ask the same doubt, either it would go unanswered or you would be redirected to this page – choice is yours!
8. You did something else silly, inappropriate or unprofessional – It could be writing an obscene comment or email, asking for personal favors, mud slinging on fellow readers or companies in an unconstitutional language – please remember it reflects poorly on you and would get deleted.
Now that you know what you may be doing wrong, question is how to do things right. I believe this article along with articles listed below could help. Happy reading!
1. How to find a summer internship that matters.
2. How to apply for a summer internship
3. How not write a summer internship resume (Part 1 & Part 2)
4. How and why to follow up on summer internship application
5. How to write an effective Statement of Purpose
Hope this helps. Wish you all the best!
Image credit: – http://www.freestockphotography.com.au/stockimages/514.jpg
