Every student knows the importance of gaining internship experience while in college – and if they don’t, they should know that it’s crucial to landing that full-time, paying gig later on. And finding an internship doesn’t have to be complicated.
Some basic places to start the search:
- College job and internship boards. The University of Minnesota has GoldPASS, St. Thomas has a Career Development Center and so on. Currently, I post all of our internship opportunities with dozens of colleges and universities in the metro area.
- Professional association websites. If you’re in PR/Marketing/Comm/Social check out MIMA, Minnesota PRSA, MN AMA, etc. Not in the PR game? Try LifeScience Alley for the medical field. Or the Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers. While many of the opportunities may be full-time, experienced jobs, internships can sometimes be found on these sites.
- Linkup.com. A great search engine that pulls from company career pages, rather than relying on recruiters to post the opportunities with an outside service.
- UPDATE: Of course, in my rush to complete this post I forgot to include LinkedIn. Definitely a great place to connect with recruiters and look for opportunities.
Now, moving beyond the obvious places to search. Time to get a bit more creative.
- Industry blogs. This might take a bit more digging for some industries. For PR, obviously, MN PR Blog comes top of mind.
- Email listservs. Again, not as obvious. But the ones that you find could be golden. For instance, Pollen curated by Lars Leafblad covers a wide range of industries while Arik Hanson’s HAPPO newsletter is focused on PR and similar fields.
Last, but certainly not least, get social. Especially with Twitter.
- Find recruiters from companies where you would like to work. Follow them. See if they post any opportunities. Respond to some of their tweets – like a normal human being, not a desperate job seeker, at least initially.
- Follow people who are leaders and connectors in your industry. They will most likely retweet opportunities to their followers. UPDATE: one recommendation for Twitter? @MarketingJobMN
- Search popular hashtags. Again, there’s #HAPPO for folks in the PR world. But I’m sure there are many others, including basics like #intern, #internships, etc.
- Participate in Twitter chats. There are Twitter chats for everything. You can choose to go broad, with something like #internchat that happens every Tuesday from 6-7 p.m. or #jobhuntchat on Mondays from 9-10 p.m. Or go niche with #legalchat, #NPTalk or #PhDChat. Check the schedule and start chattin.’
So there you go. Some places to start searching for available internships. Any other places that you’ve found brimming with internship opportunities? Feel free to share!
