Career Center

Among the most coveted college job that a college student can hold is an internship with a prestigious company. An internship is a job attachment to a company that is usually unpaid, where a student becomes part of the company’s workforce, even doing work that paid employees do as well. This is meant to expose the student to the realities of working in that particular company, and provide the student with valuable experience about what being part of the workforce is really like.

Most companies will offer a student an internship during the summer months, so that they can work at the company full-time, instead of having to juggle their studies and work at the same time. There are, however, some companies that will offer students internships even during the school year, so students can split their time between studying and working.

Unless you are truly an outstanding student, an internship can be extremely difficult to obtain. They are among the most highly contested college jobs available, and every student would love the opportunity to secure an internship, and be able to put that down in their resume afterward as well.

The question, then, is how to increase your chances of securing an internship? With so many students competing for these same college jobs, you can be sure that a company would be swamped with applications from students for that single place, and the company has the unenviable task of sorting through all those applications and picking only one student to fill the internship spot.

With that in mind, students need to find some way to make themselves stand out when the person at the company in charge of internship applications is leafing through the hundreds of applications from students. There must be something about you that makes that person sit up and take notice, instead of simply scanning through your application and moving it from one pile to another.

The first thing to do is know exactly which internship you wish to pursue. You then need to find out everything you can about the company offering the internship and the industry that it operates in. This knowledge will help you tailor your resume such that you stand among the crowds of applicants. You can then proceed to tailor your college activities to suit your desired college jobs, such as getting involved in clubs and interest groups. For example, if you are looking to secure an internship in a business firm, then you should participate in a business interest group that meets regularly to discuss solutions to the financial problems that plague the country.

These are the proactive initiatives that employers love to see in students, because it signals that a student is truly interested not only in securing an internship for the sake of having one of these prestigious college jobs, but for the sake of true interest and passion. Because companies also treat interns as potential employees once they have graduated, they would consider a candidate who showed such passion and interest ideal for the position, and would probably grant you the internship over other applicants who do not demonstrate such interest.

Filed under: Business