<p>I believe the only company here offering Electrical Engineering internships is the local power utility. Wouldn't experience there only set me up for working at power plants? Should I consider transferring to a university in an area with lots of internship opportunities after my sophomore year? I'm just now going through Precalc and I've just started using my Pell Grants, so hopefully I'm not trapped here at this point. </p>
<p>Assuming companies will not consider interviewing someone who's not local, what options would you suggest? Also, would I need a 3.9 to transfer to some place like University of Washington?</p>
<p>Check to see if your university is having a career fair and find out which companies are attending, I find it hard to believe that there is only one EE company recruiting from your school. If recruiting really is that bad on your campus then it will be considerably harder to get internships but not impossible. You can always go to any EE company website like Texas instruments or Intel and apply for an internship online. Technically going to a well recruited school will drastically increase your chances of getting a good internship and ultimately a good job.</p>
<p>I will have to ask on Monday. Apparently, years ago, my cousin tried to get an internship from the power utility but couldn’t. He wasn’t able to go forward and changed to Psychology. This was in his Junior year so he needed to take out loans.
True, but I read in another thread that being recruited in person gave better chances.</p>
<p>By and large you don’t have to limit your scope to companies in your city. Be geographically flexible and your available opportunities will multiply.</p>
<p>The only sizable company where I live is Dominos (and the school itself I suppose). Hardly anyone interns in the same city as the university. Not that many even intern in the state. You can go anywhere for an internship.</p>
<p>Why haven’t you thought to move for the internship? I moved 7.5 hrs away for the spring semester to get some experience. Most people do this unless they live in a big hub, and even then a lot of people still leave the city for other cities.</p>
<p>This has been a big problem for my son. He has had to work on or near his campus for summer employment because there is no industry other than tourism in our city. He had hoped to be recruited by companies in a city in the same state because he was at that state’s flagship university, but such was not the case. Only local industry to the university were big recruiters on campus, and that limited his options drastically.</p>
<p>Even when son got interviews from online internship applications this year and expressed that he was willing to bear the cost and inconvenience of moving hundreds of miles away to do an internship, the companies didn’t proceed forward with him, even though he was well qualified for the job. Clearly, being local to the area, even if you didn’t attend a local university, gives one an advantage to gaining internships.</p>
<p>Because of this, he is looking at grad schools where the industries are, and not just in the same state, but in the same metropolitan area. He will likely end up in an urban campus because of this, or a campus that he knows these companies recruit at. How to find that out is something I’d love to know. Because my husband works for one company son applied at, we found out that the company doesn’t even look at students from son’s school, even though they have a large presence in the state. Wish we had known that three years ago.</p>
<p>@ Montegut: My school has the Research Triangle Park right next to us, tons of companies that recruit heavily from us. Take a look at NCSU if you are interested. Myself, and all of my friends/acquaintances have gotten both local and non-local internship/coop’s without a problem.</p>
<p>This depends on so many other things. My sophomore year I did an internship roughly 800 miles away from my university and roughly 700 away from my hometown in a state I had never even visited in passing. I had friends doing summer internships in California, Washington, New York, Florida, Texas… that pretty much hits every corner of the country all with positions filled from a university in a small town in the middle of the corn fields in the middle of Illinois. If the company wants you, they aren’t going to care that you are from farther away.</p>
<p>I hate to say it, but no matter whether your son was judged by said companies as qualified or not, for one reason or another he was deemed less desirable than peers. Maybe he simply doesn’t interview well since it appears he was getting to the interview stage, implying that his resume and experience was good enough to at least get him that far. See if he has tried doing practice interviews at the university’s career center, perhaps.</p>
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<p>Be careful. The recruiting of graduate students takes a different path than recruiting of undergraduate students. When you get a graduate degree, you are specializing. With an MS, you still have some mass-marketability so the companies that recruit at the school’s career fair are still relevant and usually that list is publicly available. Be careful though because even if 12 companies are recruiting your son’s engineering specialty at the career fair, maybe only half or so are looking to recruit graduate students at that career fair.</p>
<p>Another important thing to look at is the positions attained by your professor’s former students. Most professors will happily divulge this information and some even have it on their CV. When your son looks for graduate schools, make sure to take that sort of information into account if it is a major concern for him. For a PhD you are practically hitching your wagon to your specialization topic and its related topics and as such looking at the companies at the career fair is useless and you have to rely almost exclusively on your professor’s former students and graduate-student-specific recruiting events on campus. Any successful engineering professor has a whole lot of industry connections and academic connections, so don’t take what I am saying as doom and gloom.</p>
<p>bonehead, it sounds like you went to UIUC. That is a nationally renowned school for engineering, no doubt about the demand for students in the program. If one goes to a meh-state U or Unknown-but-ABET private U, companies would just rather take a local student (either one whose (parents’) home is near the company, or who whose meh-school is near the company). </p>
<p>Like mamaposter said, one could explicitly agree to pay for and deal with all the moving inconveniences on ones own dime, but the company still won’t have it. Too much logistics involved for a replaceable/temporary intern, and if from a meh-school it just ain’t worth their HR’s efforts.</p>
<p>Right but if he got the interview at a national company (as indicated by Montegut), that means he made it past the part of the search where the school plays the bigger rule. If you get the interview then your school is not likely to be the major factor anymore as the interviewer has decided to overlook your school being weak (if that’s in fact what they think). At that point it is likely interviewing skills in some fashion holding you back.</p>
<p>I don’t have any specific advice about where to look for internships since I’m not in your field (nor do I know where you are), but I would strongly recommend that you don’t worry about being pigeonholed into any career. When you’re starting out, people will expect you to be doing pretty much whatever you can get (though explain it better if you’re ever asked about it in an interview =D), and I doubt having an internship in a power plant will doom you to forever work in power plants, if that’s not where your internship lies. I worked in a plant biochemistry lab for three years as an undergrad, and I’m not doing anything remotely related to my research or plant biology. An internship is always better than no internship at all, and if you really don’t have any other companies in your area, you can’t afford to be picky.</p>
<p>Are there summer programs you could apply to? I applied to some research fellowships when I was an undergrad and they had separate awards for students who came from research universities and students who came from LACs or smaller schools with less research opportunities, as a way to compensate for the easier opportunities students have at big research universities. Perhaps, you could find something similar. Are there companies that have summer internships or programs? If you returned home for the summer, are there more companies in your area that you could apply to for summer internships? Doing things over the summer is a great way to get experience because you have the flexibility to relocate and you can work full time, which would give you better experience.</p>
<p>Have you asked your professors, the career services center, or your advisers for suggestions? They may be able to give you some good advice about your options, areas or companies you may not have looked at yet, or alternatives that you may not have considered.</p>