Colin McKnight
Let’s be real. The vast majority of us often-mischaracterized students, at some point or another, do live up to one of our biggest stereotypes: We’re not afraid to procrastinate.
Hopefully, if you are a procrastinator, some of the things that you are not holding off for another day are the search for internships and your career success in general. Career counselor Penny Loretto for The Balance Careers sums it up: “Internships are a proven way to gain relevant knowledge, skills, and experience while establishing important connections in the field.”
It’s tempting to go, “Hey, I’m only a freshman, or a sophomore, so I can hold off on that for a bit.” But that goes against the entire reason that most people go to college. We’re here to gain the knowledge and experience to jump into the professional world, and you have to use all the time and opportunities paid for by your tuition to compete in this extremely competitive world. That hurts me to say, because I’m naturally a very noncompetitive person, but the best internships and jobs will fly right by you and into someone else’s hands if you don’t give it your all.
Of course, for your first semester or so, it’s probably not productive to seek top-tier internships, or potentially any internships at all. You definitely have a “grace period” at the beginning of your college career that you should dedicate to getting used to your college life and getting a rough estimate of where you want to go from there.
After that, though, you should get to work looking for work.
The biggest hoop is your resume and cover letter. Meet with career counselors if you can, and work on making your career documents professional and impressive for employers. One of the best pieces of career advice I ever heard was to make cover letters for all listings, even if they don’t ask for them. It’s a small part of the job search process that won’t take you longer than 10 minutes, but it puts you above a large part of your competition.
Personally, internship hunting was something I stressed over, and made some mistakes with, for a long time. I just landed my first internship recently, but the whole process before that kept me up for far more nights than I’d like to admit. “Where should I apply?” “What is my skill set?” “Am I ready for a professional internship in a course that I’m still relatively new to?” A million and one similar other questions kept me up at night. Although I eventually landed one, I could have gotten started even earlier.
As I previously mentioned, you aren’t the only one looking for a step up. There are others eyeing the same position you are, and they’re just as hungry. The earlier you start, the earlier you can pad out your resume with various skills and experiences, and the earlier you can beat your competitors to the punch. If you’re still trying to find stable footing at college, that’s fine. But make sure you don’t use that as just an excuse to hold off on the next step of your career, like I did.
If you’ve got a bunch of questions about what you’re even supposed to be doing, like I did, I highly advise using the resources available here at NC State, because they answered a large chunk of the thousand questions that I had.