How To Find the Summer Internship or Job of your Dreams

Finding and Internship or job is one thing and securing it is another thing. Learn how to do both in this helpful article series.

April is Summer Employment month at Young & Freelancing – stay tuned for more articles on internships and jobs, how to beef up your client roster, the best places to work for designers, bootstrapping yourself to success, and finding that opportunity of your dreams.

For you young freelancers attending school with the summer off, it’s important to use your time away from the rigors of school wisely to make some money, gain professional experience, and work on personal development. Freelancing all summer is not for all of us and one alternative is to supplement freelance work with an internship or part time job.

Internships are a great way to add tremendously to your resume and add a new skill set to your repertoire. They may even help you get freelance work at a later date or give you the opportunity to turn your internship into a job. Come back tomorrow for tips on how to get the internship or summer job of your dreams once you find it.

In my search for summer employment I’ve come up with a general internship and job time-line. These are dates and deadlines you should set for yourself to set yourself up for success this summer.

timeline for internship

How to Find It

Attend a career fair - Like I did this weekend here at MICA. Usually organized by your school or college, a career fair is a great way to meet a whole bunch of potential employers in one place and a great way to get your name out there. They are high pressure and are usually limited by time. Before you go, rank the employers you want to work with most and make them a priority.

Find the places you want to work and target them – Learn about your favorite design firm or magazine and put that knowledge to good use when you talk to them. Create tiers of preferred employment and make yourself appealing and available to the top tier first by writing cover letters specifically for them and sending them your resume and work samples.

Guess who will need and intern or a new employee and convince them – Not all the places you want to work will have a “now hiring” sign in their storefront. Figure out which places have hired interns in the past and which places you could convince to employ you. A bit of persuasive writing is required here but if you convince them there is a need for an intern or a new employee then that person will likely be you.

Ask old employers and network – Go down your resume and ask your past employers if they know of any opportunities for you this summer, whether that might be at their company or somewhere else. Ask a few to lunch and have an informal chat about summer prospects and pump them for information about other opportunities.

Get your name out there – In a previous post I mentioned guerrilla marketing as a great way to find jobs in today’s economy and I wanted to share more guerrilla marketing techniques. These are all cheap and highly effective ways to get your name out there courtesy of Bootstrapping Blog.

Use the internet. Job sites will often have postings for interns as well as part time position for summer months. There are also many sites that are specifically internship sites that will help you find the right internship for you from a very large database. Sign up for these site’s RSS feeds and be in the know when a new internship or job is posted. Good ol’ craigslist shouldn’t be overlooked either. There are lots of great opportunities for summer employment and internships posted there every day. And of course the google search is not a lost cause. It may seem that the results from google can be a bit irrelevant but use these 15 googling tips from One Day One Job to help you hone in on what you want.

Find the best. I looked through a regional design annual for my area and picked out the best places to work. Print puts out a really useful design annual every year that I’ve been using to target employers based on the quality of their work and how many times they appear in the annual. The same can be applied to other kinds of freelancing as well.

Print's Regional Design Annual 2008

Are unpaid / non profit organizations an option this summer? There are many many non profit organizations that would love to have a helping hand this summer especially in your area of expertise. Not everyone can afford to not get paid this summer but these non profit places can often be a great source for referrals, more contacts, and good networking in general.

Google alerts for companies and keywords - I certainly didn’t know about Google Alerts but it’s a surprisingly useful service. You can get updates about a specific keyword, whether that is on a company, a particular job title, or a field of work collected from news, blogs, the web, video, and groups.

Look local, semi-local, and international – Don’t confine your search to walking distance or even driving distance. Look for opportunities in your backyard, in the next town over and even further than that. Your dream internship or summer job may require you to expand your horizons and explore some options in other places on the map.

Create a street team – Get everyone you know to be on the lookout for you and even hand out your information. Create groups in multiple areas where you have friends and family and instruct them to clip newspapers, bring you up in conversation, recommend you for positions, and hand out your information.

Get newspapers sent to you – Print advertising may have seen its better days but newspapers can be a great source for finding internships and jobs. The classified would apply here yes, but also take a look at the editorials and articles for that particular area and see if you can find an opportunity there. Go online and get newspapers sent to you from the areas you want to work in the most and then start clipping.

Magazine lists - One Day One Job also has a great list of lists in magazines of the most innovative and fastest growing companies in America. Use this as a list of dream employers and goals of the best places to work.

Go to where potential employers might be – A convention, a conference, a meeting, a dinner event. When you’re there don’t miss the opportunity to schmooze with the best of them using the tips from my previous article.

Now you know how to find the summer internship of you dreams. Check back tomorrow for many more tips on how to actually get that internship or job once you’ve found it.

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