The Internship Scramble

Applying for an internship or competitive summer job is like steamrolling your life into short sentences, tattooing those to cover letters, resumes, essays and writing samples, shrink-wrapping it all into an email and waiting, hung from your toes, until someone catches you with a fish hook.  Short answer: internship applications are confusing.  And painful.

There are some merciful, easily acquired internships. Found through family, friends or by hear-say, the recommendation are followed by an interview and the job; no steamrolling, tattooing or shrink-wrapping required. A friend of mine was pegged for one of these: $4000 for two months of cross-country biking, days spent as a hunky bike mechanic and evenings at plush hotel restaurants.  The majority of internships or summer jobs I’m looking at, however, are strikingly less easily acquired and well-paid. If they pay at all.

Luckily for those who secured their internships early—not me, clearly—our Career Services office offers grants to cover expenses while working that dream job this summer.  A small school like St. Lawrence doesn’t have the clout to ensure all out students paid internships (although this is a future goal of ours) so Career Services picks up the difference when an otherwise great internship might leave you homeless on a park bench come September.  

The awesome interns I worked with last summer, on a rainy daytrip to Ottawa.

I see my broad Liberal Arts background as both a help and a hindrance in finding internships I’d enjoy.  Playing with children in a Denver daycare? I could do that. Working with social media and communications at AARP? Yup, I’m qualified.  Planting trees and biking around Seattle? Sounds great—I’d do and love them all! I could spend my life applying for all the great internships I’ve found via our school SaintsLink, Idealist listings and the Good Food Jobs site.  But I’m still a full-time student, so I can’t apply for them all.

Besides the time required to find internships and jobs, selling myself over and over to people I likely will never meet is exhausting in itself. The cover letter/resume duo is a one-shot chance to prove how awesome I am, whether I enjoy the self-promotion or not.  To accurately sell myself I have to analyze each and every job, after-school activity and challenging experience I’ve ever had and apply what I’ve learned to the job I want.  I go through journals, my old essays, emails to family and friends.  I can make swimming apply to daycare work.  And Admissions to planting trees in Seattle.  I have to, if I want the job. 

Then come the doubts.  Am I really qualified for this?  Do I really want to spend my summer in an office doing paperwork 3000 miles from my cat?  What if I hate it, what if I can’t do it, what if they never even look at the cover letter I spent three days perfecting and give the job to a co-worker’s son? After investing so much time and mental energy making myself sound fabulous on paper I begin to question if the real me lives up.  I’ve been told my whole life not to sell out, not to commodify myself.  But to get a great job or internship, to a point I must.

But then everyone has to do this, I think.  Anyone in the world who looks for something new, something outside her comfort zone, a job his dad or grandma can’t help him obtain.  Everyone struggles with the simultaneous need to be honest and to market one’s experiences to stand out.  I do my best, then, to fill out the applications honestly, blindly hoping all other applicants do the same. I visit Career Services eight times, bringing covers and resumes as I churn them out. And then I wait to hear about a summer in sparkling Seattle or one spent lifeguarding at the good ol' YMCA by my house in Norwell.