Summer is here and students are on a look out for internships. Internships help you get practical experience, learn skills, and boost their resume. It is your boarding pass to a great career. Most students who are first-time applicants are confused on how to apply for internships. Here are the key pointers which you should take care of while applying for an internship:
1. Application: Most organisation ask mandatory questions based on the profile they are hiring for. Employers also include generic questions like ‘Why should you be hired for this internship’ in the application form. This is one of the most crucial aspects of your application where you need to establish your credentials to the employer. Make sure you are not committing these two most common mistakes:
a) Poor writing skills: A poorly written answer, with grammatical and spelling errors, improper punctuation and capitalization, and use of SMS language, irks employers the most. They see it as careless at best, and discourteous at worst.
Tip – You may use Grammarly to check your grammatical errors before you fill out your application. You can also read the most common grammatical mistakes which students make while applying for an internship.
b) Plagiarising an answer from the internet: By copying and pasting a generic answer to this question from the internet, you may have saved yourself time, but with little or no impact. (If you can Google the question, the employer can also Google your answer).
Tip – Always write your own answer and customise it for different internships that you apply for. Check out a good sample answer. To understand how to write a strong cover letter, read this article and this post.
2. Does your profile stand out? : You need to show the employer what you bring to the table. Most companies prefer candidates with past examples of similar work in the area of the internship. The more internships and project experiences you have under your belt, the better. If you haven’t done an internship before, including volunteering and extracurricular activities in the profile. This improves your chances of getting shortlisted. Though, make sure that you include only relevant experiences – an employer doesn’t need to know what singing competition you won in your high school. Two important reasons why an employer rejects a profile are:
a) Incomplete profile: Many students don’t fill their profile completely and start applying in a haste. An incomplete profile doesn’t show the complete picture of your skills and capabilities to the employer, thereby hampering your chances. If you are looking for a content writing internship, for example, make sure that you add links to all the relevant writing samples, published articles/stories, blog links etc. along with mentioning any awards and achievements in that field in the past. Similarly, many students don’t fill their graduation details if they are still pursuing it, which leads to a misunderstanding later on.
b) A weak profile: If even after taking care of all the aforementioned points you are not getting any positive response, it’s likely that somehow you didn’t stand out amongst other applicants. Landing an internship is a highly competitive affair. You might try to strengthen your profile by taking up online courses, undergoing some training in your subject, starting new projects individually or with your professor, continuously reading about the subject online etc.; we highly recommend you do that. One must never stop learning.
3. Outdated contact details: Many students tend to change their numbers, especially when they visit their hometown during summer/winter breaks. You need to make sure your contact number is up-to-date on your resume, in case an employer decides to contact you. In addition, using the accounts which you most probably created in your early teens might sound a little ridiculous to the employers. Take, for example, an applicant with the mail id “mr_cool2001@rediffmail.com” who might be considered too immature by the employers. Don’t allow carelessness to cost you your internship.
Tip – Don’t be content with just completing some training/courses. You need to show the employer that you have actually used the knowledge in a practical application and have built an original product. Take, for example, someone running a blog, or creating an app/website in college.
India has evolved into a startup hub and you have plethora of opportunities knocking your door. Internship is your first job before the actual job where you learn new skills. So get ready to experiment with your career this summer with a meaningful internship.
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