How much help do students get from faculty, counselors,etc in getting internships?
In terms of faculty, this will largely depend on the individual faculty or department themselves. When you declare your major (or sometimes even before), you are then subscribed to a list with all these job opportunities. There are quite a few of these and I often get multiple emails from them each day. There’s all sorts of opportunities you can find on these emails. Individual faculty members are often happy to help you with career advice or in your job search, although I have found it helpful to narrow down what you are looking for first.
How helpful they will be will also depend on the professor and their own connections or experience in the field. Some of my professors have offered to introduce us to former students or other connections on LinkedIn, Others have specific suggestions of opportunities they are familiar with. This seems like a popular practice among business school faculty. Because William & Mary has small class sizes, you will often be able to know professors on a more personal level, which is helpful for when you need recommendations or references. Several of my professors have actually asked for more personalized information because they wanted to tailor the recommendations to each application and were against generic letters of recommendation.
As for the career center, they have counselors by department or subject area, have one-on-one appointment sessions, mock interviews with hiring managers or executives, workshops for students looking to find internships, visiting recruiters for interns/jobs, job fairs each semester, and a huge database of W&M specific jobs you can apply to. Additionally, I have found the career ambassadors helpful in suggestions into where to look for finding specific types of jobs. Despite these resources, a large part of the work in finding internships, as it imagine it is at any school, will be up to you. You are going to have to be the one seeking out these internships and applying to them.There is a lot of help along the way, but you have to be proactive and seek out those resources because no one is going to magically hand you an internship unless you are talking to a potential recruiter. For this reason, I recommend talking to all the people around you and taking advantage of those resources. You never know where it might lead.