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By Bill Wu

Each winter, flocks of young men and women in charcoal suits and starched shirts will flock toward the meccas of internships and career fairs. The search for the holy grail has each person on their toes, from prepping their game day outfit, to 30 corrections to the resume the week before, to the incessant Careercat search. Just how much does these internships factor into your careers and what can you do to prepare yourself? I will attempt to answer some of these issues with some of my own experience.

Preparation: Preparation is the key to success in everything you do. The typical path to a good internship is as follows: Freshmen year: get good grades, get some leadership experience related to your career. Sophomore Year: get better grades, stare at Careercat for everything that comes your way, and apply to all of them; get an internship experience to leverage next year. Junior Year: network, network, network, and study up on all technicals for interviews, and apply to many places. Do Chicago Field Studies if possible in the fall. Senior Year: find jobs, kill interviews, and land offers.

GPA: It matters. Depending on what industry/career field you’re looking at, the requirement is different. Your GPA must be at least 3.0 for any decent job/internship. For a slightly better job, 3.2 is the mark. For a competitive job in areas like Consulting or Investment Banking, don’t apply unless it’s at least 3.5 because the informal one will be much higher. That being said, there are always exceptions and ways to overcome this.

Work Experience: Crucial. Try to get some work experience early on, say sophomore year. You don’t have to aim for the moon this early on, but try to get something that you can leverage into better internships next year. For whatever career path you follow, research into the field and what kind of experience they look for. Based on that, target and filter out places you want to work. Apply through careercat but also go beyond that. Where do your family and friends work that you might want to intern at? What firms do you want to work at? And if they don’t have a hiring procedure, cold call them and sell yourself with a 30 second pitch.

Networking: Very Important. The difference between knowing somebody well at a company while applying vs not is the difference between the sky and the ground. Remember the saying, it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know. There’s tons of people out there with skills similar to yours, so why should they pick you? Either because you’re extremely attractive candidate or because they know you and like you. Get creative with this: go to career fairs, talk to family/friends, network with seniors on campus, alumni database, cold emailing/calling, referrals, go where they go (caddy at their golf clubs, join similar gyms as them).

Resumes/Cover Letters: Get these things looked over by at least 5 different people. Use templates to start off with but change and tweek it as time goes on. For different industries, prepare different versions of your resume targeting them specifically. For cover letters, have a template ready and change it for specific companies while adding a personal touch about their company or why you became interested specifically.

Chicago Field Studies: Do it if you can afford it. It’s a great way to gain a work experience otherwise blocked off by highly insurmountable barriers. But if you are doing well in other respects and can’t dish out the time or money, go for other alternatives.

Career Path & Majors: Don’t go for the fields everybody’s going for. Research different industries, talk to people, and see if the area interests you. Otherwise don’t waste your life at college preparing for something you’ll regret the rest of your life. Mainstream is not the way to go because if you are passionate about something, by all means go for it, because you’ll likely end up more successful than the typical careers people go into. Passion about your work will go a much longer way to make your life more enjoyable. In addition, take classes that interest you because life is short and spending your time meaningfully is different from spending it practically & boringly or spending it with pleasure but wasted.

I know I wrote this with a lot of personal bias and in a really brisk matter, but I wanted to get the message across. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself and I hope you don’t tread down the same path. Leave comments if you want to hear about other areas.

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