How to Land an Internship Your Freshman Year of College

If you are a freshman in college, you could be applying your free time to your future. Indeed, there are countless businesses in multiple fields that are looking for people to complete odd jobs for little or no pay. In common parlance, this would be considered an internship.

What’s the benefit of doing free work? One of the benefits of being an intern is that you get to learn on-the-job and you gain real world experience. This real world experience is worth its weight in gold when it comes to entering your future career. If you want to get your foot in the door in a real job, having that internship experience may be the key to opening that door. Here is how to land an internship your freshman year of college.

Decide What Field You Want to Enter

During your first year of college, you will probably declare a major. If you choose something like journalism, you may want to look for newspapers or magazines around your college that are looking for interns. You may be working at the copy-editing desk for your first few months, but pretty soon you may be working in the newsroom. It’s all about starting somewhere.

Start With Companies in the Surrounding Area

When it comes to finding these businesses, you want to use a number of different sources. For one thing, you can use search engines with a location tracker to find various businesses and organizations that are close to your campus. You could find a satellite internship, but if you want to get your hands dirty, you may want to find a location you can walk or bike to.

Do Your Research

When you do look for businesses or enterprises that offer internships, you want to do your research about the organization before you start. The last thing you want is to start interning at a disreputable company – this will look bad on your resume. It doesn’t matter if you go to University of Cincinnati or University of California, you want to be sure that the company you are working for doesn’t have any unscrupulous business practices and you want to make sure the business is legitimate.

Find Out if the Internship Counts as Credit

On top of finding out if a business is reputable or not, you want to make sure that your internship counts as credit. Many young college students don’t realize that the internships could offer some college credits that could be applied to courses, which means that you may not have to sit in a class or you don’t have to take a certain prerequisite.

Go on Interviews

Your last step is often the most fun: you get to talk to business owners and leaders. This is the part where you really get to let yourself shine. Indeed, though, you want to be serious and treat it just like a job interview, because essentially it is. In the end, you want to be as confident and passionate as you can be.