Yes. Lots of undergrad business schools have that and those options are usually for juniors. Seems like it’s the same for undergrad engineering. We know a lot of kids who are undergrad business/engineering majors and they didn’t really have internships until that summer after junior year. I always think that’s interesting. Many times it works out for them and they get an offer for after graduation.
We told our kids at LACs that it’s not an option for them to not have internships for those earlier summers since they won’t have a business school or engineering school pipeline for that important summer before senior year. They need to have work experience on their resume.
It’s not impossible to get internships during other summers but for the finance related opportunities, they typically want candidates who have taken the related coursework, and often that hasn’t yet happened prior to the end of junior year. Additionally, in my daughter’s case, they did a tremendous amount of training during the internship and I don’t think they’d want to spend the time and money on the training for rising sophomores and rising juniors.
My daughter handled the intern selection/recruiting this year for her group, and she definitely looked for candidates that she felt would make the transition to permanent employment. Not every fit is perfect and not everyone gets the permanent offer but they try not to waist their time.
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My DD obtained her current UN internship through a professor. She was not having any luck through networking with alums. She finally reached out to a professor who was very happy to help. The prof just sent an email to a high level contact at the agency and my DD had an interview and offer within a week.
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Yes. I totally get that. For more pre-professional majors, companies are looking for the kids to have certain classes under their belts. I guess my point was that for the business and engineering kids we know, many of them were able to keep their high school type summer jobs (life guard, retail, etc) until that summer before senior year and still score a good internship because their hiring was based on specific course work. For kids majoring in things like math or history at an LAC, they likely need more on their resume. Some kids we know at LACs were able to get internships every summer to get more real world experience or they took online courses on Excel or Python or Finance to get “badges” they can present on LinkedIn and their resumes. There is sometimes that extra step for a liberal arts major to be super marketable.
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My D got both of her internships and her co-op through the on campus job fair.
She also just got a job in a research lab for her last school year by reaching out to the professor.
She’s had a job in her field (engineering) every summer since she started college.
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Note that for URMs and all females, recruiting for many of the banking analyst post-junior year internships is completed in spring semester of soph year.
There are quite a few investment firms that offer summer internships after first and second years of college, but many don’t hire undergrads directly out of school (so no reason to do a post junior year summer internship at these firms as no post-grad offer will be coming). These firms prefer to get trained analysts after they’ve worked at least 2 years.
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D’s internship search was a while ago but I think networking, talking to her professors and reaching out to alumni is what got her the internships.
She did summer abroad freshman year, then worked for a well known policy think tank in DC and finally worked for the election campaign of our governor.
S, because of his NM scholarship, had access to a recruiter (in the company that was endowing his scholarship) who would guide all the scholarship recipients through their internship search within the company — I believe he used it once but decided against working there.
The internships that he eventually accepted were found by networking with fraternity alumni. He had return offers from both his sophomore year internship & Co-op and freshman year summer internship but he wanted something different.
So for his junior year, he searched through Indeed and company websites, found the internship on the company website and applied through a family member who worked there.
Late to the game, but my eldest has had a few “real jobs” so I will describe her experience.
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First “real” job landed through a posting at campus career center. She started looking in early October of senior year in 2019 and was offered the job a month later. She still considered other jobs and interviewed through Jan/Feb of 2020. (See #3.)
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Covid came, and the job start date was delayed until October of 2020. A family friend told her about a summer job doing research at a university. They offered her an option to continue in the winter of 20-21, but by then, she was looking at a different career track. She said no. The summer job gave her transferable skills for her current job.
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While working at the summer job, she actively continued looking for a different job from the position listed in #1. She felt she needed to move in a different direction. An alumnus alerted the (major) department at her college. She immediately sent her resume and now works there. (She gave a month’s notice to the first job that she wouldn’t be taking the position.) I’ll add that she had interviewed for several other positions at this place and hadn’t landed those jobs, which are very competitive.
She starts grad school in the fall. #3 is relevant because without her current job, she would not have been accepted to her grad school program.
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Interesting story about how my son got his internship. He got two or three interviews through a job fair on campus. One day he had an interview and was dressed in interview clothes for a class as the interview was immediately following. The class had a guest speaker. My son went up to the guest speaker after class to ask him a question. The guest speaker was impressed with him and his question and found out he was headed off to an interview. He in turn gave him his card and told him to call him.
A week later my son was at a networking luncheon and was seated next to a representative from the same company as the guest speaker. They got to talking and the name of the speaker came up, and the representative was also impressed and offered him an interview. They had 4 internships and he was offered one of them with the three others coming from different universities. Offered full time at the end of summer.
My point is, networking is the key and you never know where that offer for the interview may come from.
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DD’17 got her graphic design internship because her aunt showed a logo she made to a print shop owner who it turned out was going to need some help that summer.
DD’19 got this summer’s upcoming internship by cold-emailing her resume to a few places. It happened that the one who hired her had plans to advertise for an intern for the first time the following week.
That wasn’t my daughter’s experience at UNC, but it could be different depending on the school. The first round of acceptances into the business school don’t even happen until sophomore year (and some don’t get in until junior year), so they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the recruiting offered by KF until they were accepted into the program.
That is just finance/banking industry practice for many of the top firms, it has nothing to do with a given school.
If UNC KF isn’t helping students access these URM and female programs, the students are missing out and disadvantaged (or they need to apply to these programs on their own), because many post junior year analyst summer internships are filled in spring of soph year.
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The recruiting for many of these programs actually now start freshman year.
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True, there are programs/speaker events for first years too. I also want to add that students don’t have to be business or Econ majors to get these internships. Analytic majors like math, etc as well as even lab science majors are welcome. So perhaps UNC students (just to stick with the example) are accessing these opportunities first and second years.
I have no idea if they are or they aren’t but students don’t even apply to KF until sophomore year (even the select few direct admits don’t start much before sophomore year). it’s possible that another arm of UNC reaches out to these students at an earlier time.
ETA - you are correct, there are programs for those groups that do focus on early recruiting, in addition to the regular recruiting.
Networking is key and a very valuable skill to learn. Your description of your son making the calls and scheduling time during school reminded me of my son. He did a ton of calls (kept a pretty cool spreadsheet of activity) and got to the point where he became very good at them and even liked doing them. His business frat actually had him do a webx on networking. Now he enjoys being on the other side of it, taking calls from students.
I share this to emphasize how helpful alumni can be. Some schools (they tend to be smaller) have “fierce” alumni who will be very helpful. His school had career fairs and companies coming to campus for info sessions. He attended those but the job he took he found via Handshake and then networked like crazy to get the internship which turned into a job.
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Yep. I was surprised that this thread got to post number 70 without anyone mentioning networking or LInkedIn!
My daughter had a few offers from jobs she found on LinkedIn, but the position she accepted was not.
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Got it! But she found the actual job on LinkedIn? Or used to it network? I guess I was commenting more on how no one had talked about searching LinkedIn for alums and then networking…
Honestly I wasn’t paying too much attention (because she had already accepted a job at that point) but I think she found the jobs (there were 2-3) on LinkedIn. She interviewed, was offered 2, and the 3rd she declined before the interview process was complete.
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