7 Easy Steps to Help You Get an Internship Without Losing Your Mind
Are you stressed about finding your next internship? You are probably not alone in this! Let’s face it, a student faces rejection almost every single day from recruiters. This can result in a lack of focus, drop-in self-esteem, bad results, coupled with a sense of discouragement for not reaching their academic and professional objectives.
If you are in this situation, follow those 7 steps to regain confidence in your abilities and make the application and recruitment process less of a headache.
Identify your personal and professional goals
Before getting overwhelmed with the amount of work to be done, sit and talk to yourself. What are my skills? What things am I good at?
What would I like to do in 1 or 2 years? What kind of work environment best suits me? It is totally okey to not have a clear answer! The most important thing is to start thinking about your goals.
These are questions that need an answer, and no one can answer them better than you!
- Is your objective to work in a different country? Is it to reach a certain level in the hierarchy of a company?
- Would you like to work in an office, remotely from the comfort of your home or maybe have the possibility to choose?
- What field interests you the most? Most job positions fit in companies operating in a different sector. If you are passionate about music and study accounting, you can apply for an Accounting/Finance position at Spotify.
Research companies that might interest you
Congrats on the first step. Now that you have a clearer idea about what you want, it’s time to map your expectations with the companies that kind of match them.
Criteria include work environment, flexibility, culture, job description and location.
Websites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn might help you in this step.
You can find reviews from former or current employees about different companies on Glassdoor. This can help you have a clearer understanding of the management there and map these pieces of information with your professional and personal goals.
Build a Job Application Board
If your objective is to find an opportunity as fast as possible (or not), try to compile your progress in a Job Application Board. You can store information about the companies that you identified such as the name, website, information about them and maybe a contact person (if you have).
Helpful tools: Trello, Notion, Google Sheet or Excel.
Grade companies for better time management
Rule to speed up the progress: put much more effort into the opportunities that interest you more. For this, score the identified companies based on your level of interest. It will help you better manage your time and put extra attention where needed.
Craft CVs and motivation letters for each application
Personalization is the key term to make you stand out when applying for any opportunity.
If you send the same application to everyone, how can you expect different answers?
Most probably, it is going to be a NO from 30+ companies. Your choices will narrow down!
Companies receive hundreds of emails from candidates. Make yours memorable! Use the information that you extracted during the research phase to highlight your skills asked in the job description over others. Do the same for the cover letter or e-mail to make them feel intrigued about the person you are.
Helpful tool: grammarly.com (to check your email is well-formatted and does not contain grammar and punctuation mistakes).
Send your applications to recruiters
Now that you crafted different versions of your CV and motivation letter or email for every company, it’s time to send them!
Tip: Use mailtracker.io to see if your email has been opened or not and how many times! It will help you track the progress and make the right move for a follow-up on the status of your application.
Track your progress
Remember that Job Application Board that we worked on earlier, well it’s time to update it! It will help you have a clearer idea about what worked well and what did not work so well, adapt your strategy and better manage your time between your studies and the search process.
No excuses for not starting! Bring your notebook and a pen and start right now a conversation with you.
Good Luck ❤
If you are reading this, then you are titan. Here are few tips that will make your professional dream come true.
- Hunting for an internship is similar to betting. The rate of getting accepted differs from one company to another. The chance of getting accepted in Google is not the same as getting accepted in a newly created startup in your home country/city. It’s important to understand this and build on it. In your application board, make sure that you include diverse companies in terms of size, popularity, location and field.
