Internship Application Season, or Maybe Hell

by Naiya Patel-Kapka, Editor-in-Chief

Illustration by Emma Shoaf, Layout Assistant

So, you’re a sophomore or junior, and all that’s on your mind is yearning for the warm weather that will come in a few months. You daydream about lounging on the beach, or walking around campus with a short skirt and flowers in your buttonholes, laughing freely in the sun. You’re excited for your spring semester classes and the new friends you’ll make. But the adults in your life have a different agenda: reminding you, repeatedly, that the most dreaded, nightmarish time of year is here…..Internship Application Season.

Stage 1: You start looking for an internship. There are too many choices for the prestigious ones, and you know that none of them are likely to accept you, so you pick two or three. Then you spend hours combing lists made by your school and other schools, Handshake, LinkedIn, and Indeed to find some smaller ones. Then you find that the deadlines for half of these passed way back in October, so you curse yourself and feel like a Stupid Idiot. Then you save the rest for later and make a schedule of when you will apply for each one. (Spoiler: You won’t have time to apply for most of them.)

Stage 2: You start putting together the application materials for various internships, which means you are asking your two favorite professors for letters of recommendation every week of January and February, and this gets really awkward. Guilt and anxiety consumes you every time you send either of them an email, and you just KNOW they hate you now. Also, you don’t have enough free time to write out good answers to all the application questions, revise your answers with feedback from your (overworked, I’m so so sorry) professors, and then get in all the supplementals before the deadline. So, what is there to do? You’ve kind of stopped sleeping. 

Stage 3: After this whole process, which, honestly, is more work than most college courseloads, you sit and wait. Anxiety seeps in. What if I don’t get a single internship? What am I supposed to do with my summer? So you also apply to a backup job at your local coffee shop, and you’re like hey, can I work here this summer? And they’re like, “No, we don’t hire college students because they’re a waste of time to train since they leave after three months.” So you’re pretty much contemplating running away to Argentina and WWOOFing all summer but your mom is like, “That’s not good enough for your resume, it’s the summer after your junior year, you NEED. to get an internship or at least some sort of relevant work or education experience.” The implication is that she will disown you if you don’t. So you tell her that you’ve applied for a bunch of internships already, and that whether you get one or not is out of your hands (she doesn’t believe you).

Stage 4: After months of waiting, you finally get your first decision email. It starts with “Unfortunately…” so you don’t bother opening it. And then the rest roll in, all rejections. Awesome! You wasted your time for nothing! Cool. So you go and sneak into Stevie with your friends to have dinner one night, and make the mistake of asking them what they’re doing with their summers. You listen in silence and feel like the Dumbest Idiot Loser on the planet as the conversation goes on. Friend 1 has secured a position at her mom’s best friend’s art gallery, which is unpaid but she’s getting Internship+ funding. Friend 2 is travelling to New Zealand to conduct research on lemurs with her professor, and will be completely funded by the school. Friend 3 got one of the internships that you wanted, and you cast away all notions of saying you also applied because you don’t want her to feel guilty. Friend 4 also doesn’t have an internship, which makes you feel better. But then she says that she will be staying at her aunt’s house in Spain all summer learning Spanish and you actually want to die. Now all eyes are on you: “What are YOU going to do with YOUR summer?” Their expectations are literal daggers closing in on you. So you lie and say that you’re still waiting to hear back from the internships you applied to. 

Stage 5: Your mother has thoroughly chewed you out for not getting an internship, and every time she looks at you, you can see reflected in her eyes the dunce cap you are apparently wearing. Even your younger brother was able to get a job at the local fruit market selling tomatoes. You ask him if he can get you a job there too and he says that’s not possible, they won’t hire you unless you have prior experience, and they only hired him because he used to volunteer at the farmer’s market. You go back to the cafe and lie and say you dropped out of college. They hire you, thank god. Now at least you have something. 

But really, why do we have to go through all of this? It’s been drilled into us that internships are extremely important experiences to have in college so that we can build our resumes and be more likely to get hired in our desired fields after graduation. Yet it is questionable how helpful these internships are in today’s economic climate. Our parents and professors lived in an age where work opportunities were more readily available. Life also was less expensive back then, and in today’s world, most internships are unpaid, which can’t sustain broke college students for an entire summer, or help them save up for when school starts again in the fall. Not to mention the obvious, which is that even students who do get lots of internships while in college still often find themselves unemployed post-grad. According to CBS, the overall hiring rate has been declining since 2022 and is now at a shocking low of only 3%. THREE PERCENT. Will getting a few internships while in college really increase our chances of being included in this small number of hires? 

It seems pointless to go through all of that stressful application work (not to mention the stress on our professors), and then either not get a single internship, or get an internship where you do grunt work or almost nothing. This doesn’t apply to the big, competitive internships which almost ensure a great career, but that’s essentially for less than one percent of college students. Also, the most competitive internships are more likely to accept students from big-name schools such as Harvard or Yale, and it can feel like trying to swim upstream coming from a smaller (though equally as rigorous and expensive) institution like Oberlin. 

Anyways, I’m genuinely sorry for how this article turned out. I’m reading it back and ummmm the theme seems to be that we are a stressed-out generation with doomed career and financial prospects. But, that is not the case…right? RIGHT? Someone please convince me. I usually like to remain optimistic, but I’m seriously fed up with all this internship/job market/ career planning bullshit. I hope that this article finds at least a few people who feel seen and heard in this stressful internship application season, and that it provides some comfort. I myself am veering more towards the anarchist nomad career path. Or I will be if I don’t get a fucking internship this summer.