Summer Internship: Now Required

By Lindsay Probasco on May 24, 2014

This article is brought to you by the Uloop Internship search service. Need an Internship? Use Uloop to search through the numerous great Internships offered inside and outside of your area.

Regardless of our majors, we’re all looking for one thing come summertime: internships.

Those magical strokes of luck we stumble across is something we college kids all have in common. They’re like precious gold. Maybe your degree requires one or maybe you’re just trying to get the one up on your peers. Nonetheless, we’re mercilessly fighting for those grown-up jobs that we probably aren’t even ready for yet. Nobody has seen the Hunger Games quite like this.

Today, getting employed is based on much more specialized information than ever before. With complex resumes, years of experience and extra fluff that makes you look more qualified than others, getting an internship or full-time job (when the time comes) has never been harder.

In order to even have a shot at some of the big ones, you have to talk yourself up and have the right training to support your claims. In a world where before “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a very real dictum, today it couldn’t be more misleading. We are turning over a new leaf into the age of “it’s what you know and who you know.” Internships present opportune contexts to make these connections in the industries and get firsthand familiarity with what the business is actually like.

If the opportunity presents itself, chances are you’re going to want to grab that gig before somebody else does. There are a lot of really sucky internship positions out there; there’s no denying it. You will probably get handed busy work, hate your life and regret ever accepting the offer in the first place. To top it all off, you might not be getting paid a cent. So why are we allowing ourselves the misery of suffering through a probably non-relatable waste of time just to say we did it on a piece of paper?

Because we have to, that’s why. Without any internship-type experience, it is becoming increasingly impossible to find a job. The National Association of Colleges and Employers said that “forty percent of Class of 2013 graduates who took internships were hired for full-time employment by the organization at which they interned, according to preliminary results of NACE’s 2014 Internship & Co-op Survey.” The statistics speak leaps and bounds to the importance of persisting through an internship and the numbers are only growing.

Image source: http://www.tumblr.com/search/internship+hunger+games

Yes Frodo, you most definitely need low-key experience before you can get some real experience.

However, if you come across a good one, like a really good one, your duties won’t include running to grab coffee or refilling the printer paper. You’ll get a high from doing work you want to see yourself doing for the rest of your life. You’ll look forward to going to work more than usual. No matter the business sector you choose to pursue, if you love it, there is so much to gain from being exposed to it as soon as possible.

There are so many perks to having an internship over the summer, specifically. If you’re in a big city, you can take some time to explore the place while getting comfortable working in a corporate setting. If you choose to work out in rural America, you can enjoy a country summertime filled with sunsets and crossroads to anywhere. Some of you might land internships abroad and get the opportunity to immerse yourself in another culture completely.

As an intern, your tasks will likely be enough to teach you what you need to know while still allowing you the ability to enjoy your summer. It will endorse a need for adulthood but can make you feel young at the same time by placing you at the bottom of the professional totem pole.

While at times it may seem like the tasks you work on are tedious or the amount of time you spend working on projects go unnoticed, the takeaways from having an internship can be immeasurable. Coming from a girl who just finished her first week on the job, I could not be more excited to spend my summer in the city of Chicago.

The best piece of advice I’ve received so far would be that you can’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Do everything you can to make a name for yourself, get involved with all aspects of the company (not just one) and work as hard as you possibly can.

Ah … bitch work. Gotta love it.

image source: http://fitnessandfrozengrapes.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/hunger-games-haymitch.jpg

Search through the Uloop job listings to find your next Part-Time or Full-Time employment or Internship opportunity. Employers are waiting to hear from you!

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