How to Get an Internship According to [Ctrl + F]

I’ve been trying and failing to get an internship since last year. I tried justifying not getting one last year by telling myself that I would have a stronger resume as a senior. But the logical side of me won’t let me get a famous quote of Einstein’s out of my head, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. If I go about applying in the same way as I did last year, I probably won’t get an internship and I don’t just want an internship. I need an internship! An internship is required for Advertising and Public Relations majors at Grand Valley State University. But I have a plan.

Although this type of research seems to clearly be qualitative, I wanted to take a quantitative approach. So I first needed to find a shortlist of common recommendations, so I could compare their prevalence. I landed on these keywords:

“Interest” “Resume” “Cover Letter” “Experience” “Fair” “Social Media” “GPA” “Network” “Follow” “Recommendation”

While some of these keywords are self-explanatory in this context, others are not. So here’s a brief explanation. ‘Interest’ is about specifying what you want in an internship/career. ‘Resume’ is about building a document detailing what you have done. ‘Cover Letter’ is about building a document detailing why you should be the one. ‘Experience’ is about what you have done, the difference between this and resume is how they would be improved; experience would be improved through volunteering and working, while a resume would be improved by following a professional layout, etc. ‘fair’ is about going to job/career fairs. ‘Social Media’ is about creating a good public image. ‘GPA’ is about getting good grades and showing it off. ‘Network’ is short for networking, the business term for using friends and family. ‘Follow’, short for following up, is about reaching out to companies after applying.

Note*

Before diving into the findings I’d like to acknowledge some of the glaring issues with this technique. First of all, it’s a hodge podge of a quantitative and qualitative approach, and probably a disgrace to content analysis’ name. Because if any keyword was used in a different manner than what was being collected, like in the website menu, it still counted. This gave a leg up to keywords which are used in normal speech, like ‘follow’ and ‘fair’. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to put these keywords ahead in the end.

Findings:

‘Resume’-267(occurrences) and ‘Experience’-199 were the big winners with ‘Cover letter’-97, ‘Network’-94, and ‘Interest’-89 fighting for third. GPA was the big loser with 9 total mentions. It’s also worth noting that 3 articles alone had 426 of the 938 keyword counts, which may have skewed the data and could be rejected as outliers but were not.

Application:

This is how I’m going to apply it to myself. I’m first going to revisit my Resume and find a professional template to follow. In the past I’ve used Indeed’s resume builder and I remember being at an internship fair passing it out to recruiters and one of them realized it and in that moment, I felt really dumb. So first I’m going to make my experience/knowledge look pretty. Then I’m going to reflect on what I really want to do with my career and write what I’m interested in. Then I’ll compare what I have done to what companies are expecting of me and decide how I can fill the gaps(likely through volunteer work). Last of all, I’m going to try becoming the worst case of nepotism in the 21st century.

Conclusion:

For the past 4 years almost I’ve been avoiding taking on responsibilities outside of school because I wanted to get the most out of school possible. Part-time work wasn’t a necessity for me because I saved in high school, purposefully went to community college, and lived with my parents. I don’t completely regret avoiding part-time work because I wanted to do the best I could in college, but the numbers are sobering. GPA was mentioned about once for every twenty times that experience was mentioned. Employers want polished workers, not perfect students. So I’m going to start taking my head out of the books and begin putting it to use more often, even if it means getting less than an A.