During my third year in college, I started to search for an internship, however the journey wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped. I realised that the process is gruesome for students, and you face so much rejection for the first time in your life. I had given tens of interviews but failed at the the last or second last stage in all. I eventually secured an internship after both semesters had finished and some of my batchmates has already started their internship. However, the company where I eventually did my internship was a big one, Deloitte. Also, I got to work on the exact kind of projects I had wished to work on and always wanted to learn. Here I would like to share my experiences and the things I learnt regarding how to search for an internship.

Don’t do this:

• Don’t go to a big company’s website like Microsoft or McKinsey and search/apply for internships. There is a very high chance that you won’t ever hear back from the company. This is because they want to collect potential employees data, even though they aren’t actively looking to hire. These websites make you fill out an entire application form where you have to type everything which is already in your resume, such as education history, employment history etc. Time wasted per application can be around 15 minutes.
• Connect with random people on LinkedIn who work at the companies you want to work at, and ask them if they can help you get an interview. When the person is a complete stranger, they don’t have much motivation to help you out. You will waste time doing this.

Do this:

• Make an interesting data science project which you can showcase to others. Write a LinkedIn post about that, and mention that you are looking for internships. If you don’t have any project to show, write a simple post mentioning about your interests and say that you are looking for internships.
• Use LinkedIn Advanced search tools to find people who graduated from the same college as yours and are currently CEO/founder/CTO as some company. These people are most likely to help you.
• Go to reputed job websites like Indeed, Monster, AngelList Talent and search for matching internships. Apply to them.
• Search for keywords like ‘Founder’, ‘Hiring data science intern’, etc to find people who might be interested in hiring interns. Message them asking for an internship.
• This trick is super effective: if you contact someone and they say something like, “Sorry, I don’t have any opportunities in my team”, request them to share your resume in their company or college alumni group. If a single person does this, you are very likely to hear back from someone who is looking to hire.
• To search for an internship at large companies like Microsoft or McKinsey, go to a job portal (like Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster etc) and search for the company’s name. If there’s an opening, it means the company has recently posted that and is actively looking to hire.

These were some of the things I could suggest, based on my personal experience. Your experience could be different, but for most people, the above steps will help you save time and apply better. I personally wasted a lot of time on the 2 things I mentioned in the ‘Don’t do this’ section.

If you have some other ideas, do suggest them in the comments below.

Now comes the part of negotiating your stipend. This is where most candidates feel shy and simply accept whatever is being offered. I strongly suggest to negotiate. Don’t worry, no company is going to reject you just because you asked for a higher stipend, they handle salary negotiations regularly with full time employees. You should proceed with a mail mentioning an amount around 33% higher than what they said as your expectation. Depending upon their budget it’s quite likely they would agree for what you asked or a bit lower than that. They might ask you the reason why want the specific amount, and one of the simplest answers is, “I have done some calculations, and XX amount will allow me to manage my living expenses on my own, without being dependent on my parents.”

Hope the above suggestions help you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Management consulting is an excellent field to pursue, if you want an overall development of your skills, personality and life. Firms like McKinsey, Bain and BCG are always looking for great students and it’s always a good idea to apply to as many internships as you can. The ones that are currently open to hiring candidates are listed below:

1. McKinsey: The best known company, which is also considered as a status symbol. Link to apply: here
2. Bain and Company: They have different internship programs for Bachelors students and MBA students. For Bachelors, they have Associate Consultant Interns. and for MBA, they have Summer Associates. Bachelors: here, and MBA students: here.
3. Boston Consulting Group: According to BCG, they are always hiring interns. You can apply here.
4. L.E.K. : apply here
5. Deloitte: They have quite a confusing website. You can find their management consulting internships here.
6. Accenture: apply
7. PwC: apply
8. EY-Parthenon: apply
9. Strategy&: apply
10. Oliver Wyman: apply
11. Booz Allen Hamilton: apply
12. AlixPartners LLP: apply
13. KPMG LLP (Advisory): apply
14. Kearney: apply
15. Alvarez and Marsal: apply
16. Charles River Associates: apply
17. Slalom Consulting: apply
18. CapTech: apply
19. Roland Berger: apply
20. Protiviti: apply

If you are in college, doing an internship is the best way to spend the vacation and add a major point in your resume. Most students do internships close to their college or home, some even do in far off cities. But very few do a university internship abroad. For a university, they are always looking for skilled people with an aptitude for a very specific niche.

If you want to be one of those who get the chance to go abroad and pursue an internship, read on.

In short the process is: you identify the field you want to work in, find out the professors working in the area (s). Find out their email id, and send each of them a customised email. You will have to contact each professor individually, and request him to hire you.

You need to be very careful in your approach, and please avoid the most common mistakes that people make in this process, which I’ve detailed later in this article.

Note that if you are going to be working in a university, you will be pursuing a research internship, and in most cases it will be on a project the professor is already working on. Very rarely any Professor would start a new project for an intern.

The wrong approach:
1. Go to a university’s website
2. Make a list of Professors and email ids
3. Send same email to all of them asking for internship

The correct approach:
1. Go to scholar.google.com
2. Search for your area of interest
3. Read the summary of papers and make a list of the authors whose papers you liked. If email id is not mentioned in the paper itself (or if you are unable to see the paper then search the authors’ name and affiliated institution on Google and get their email id.
4. Write a customised email for that professor. (When you write a mail to someone who you don’t know, it’s called a cold email). Make sure it has the major elements of a cold email.

Sample email

(Andrew Ng is a very famous Machine Learning researcher from Stanford University, who also founded Coursera)

Subject: Regarding possible internship opportunities under you

Mail:
Respected Prof. Andrew,
Greetings! I am Bhavesh, a fourth year undergraduate student pursuing from XYZ University. I am writing this mail to enquire about possible internship opportunities under you. [1. This is where you give simple introduction of yourself and in a straightforward manner, ask what you want from the person]

While researching, I stumbled upon and went through your paper “Rectifier Nonlinearities Improve Neural Network Acoustic Models” and really liked the work you and your team did. I am also very interested in this topic and have been working on it for quite some time. [2. This is very important, it shows that you are writing a personal mail and not one which has been sent to multiple people. It also shows that you are actually interested in the professor’s research areas.]

In the past I have worked on multiple topics in applied Machine Learning, most recently being under Prof. K. Venugopal, XYZ University, on the topic “Using Neural Networks for Stock Market Index Prediction”. Our work was well appreciated and also presented at the ABC Conference. [3. Here you are trying to tell that you have some experience in the field where you want to work.]

I went through several other research papers of yours and really liked your work. It would be an honour for me to work under you.

Please find my resume attached. [4. Your resume is required, Prof. would want to see more details about your education and experience before he takes the discussion forward.]

Waiting for a positive reply.

Regards,
Bhavesh

XYZ University

Common mistakes:
Sending the same mail to multiple professors
Not talking about your research experiences and why you are interested in his
Starting the approach very late. Ideally you should be done at least 2-3 months before the expected start date of your internship.

Hope the above article helped. Reply to this, if you want any questions.