questions about internships?

When should an engineering student start looking for internships (what year)?, I heard its difficult to find internships during freshman and sophomore year.

How many internships should be taken?
does job shadowing look good on a resume or as good as an internship (for an engineer)?

Most students look for a summer job (sometimes called an internship) for each summer. However, it is more likely for higher class standing (e.g. between junior and senior year) students to get jobs related to their majors than lower class standing (e.g. between frosh and soph year, or between high school and frosh) students.

A day or so of job shadowing is just to help you see if the kind of job may be something you like.

Big companies will use internships as long job interviews. So they will be looking for rising seniors and above. They will also have a lot of applicants, so they can be very selective (read high GPA required).

But not all internships are with big companies. So, if you aren’t a rising senior, look toward the smaller companies and the less “techy” ones. Even if a company is small, if what they do is very high tech then you might have to be back at the rising senior point to have enough acquired knowledge to perform at that internship. You should be looking for something you have the knowledge to make yourself attractive to the company that is going to offer you an internship.

You may not get an internship as a freshman or even as a sophomore, but the experience of making that resume, interviewing (hopefully) and seeing what is out there will make you a better candidate in the future. Start looking in the fall as that is when the game begins each year for summer internships.

Rather than look for internships when I was in school, I got involved with some research that a professor was doing. At first I got the grunt work (and was doing it for credit rather than money) but after a while the tasks I was doing got more and more involved. The group (I wasn’t the only one working for this prof) went out and got a NASA research contract. So then I got paid for my work over the summer after my sophomore and junior years.

Job shadowing is only useful to the student. It’s completely useless on a resume, as compared to real hands-on work experience performed in an internship.

What you heard about internships your first two years was right. No one I know got an internship as a freshman unless their family set them up. I went oh-for on probably three dozen internship applications as a sophomore, and got a lot of "call back next year"s from recruiters. Out of the students I know working this summer, I can only think of one who didn’t get his job from his parents.

Things start looking a lot better for upperclassmen. Before that point, you simply don’t have much technical background to contribute at a job. Your first two years are pretty much spent knocking out the foundation classes, all your physics and math courses plus most of your humanities requirements. In that time, you’re probably only going to complete the intro classes for your major. Third and fourth year is where you get to the more in-depth and technical stuff.

You might as well start applying for jobs now, get comfortable with polishing your resume and cover letters and talking with recruiters, just don’t expect much to come out of it. If anything though, it would be more productive for you to be asking your family and social circle if they know anywhere you could apply.

And please don’t put job shadowing on a resume.

@KF7LCE Do the jobs have to relate to my major?

Jobs that relate to your major or career goals are obviously more desirable, but even any job may be better than no job when looking for the next job.

@ucbalumnus So if Internships dont take applicants in Freshman/Sophomore year how can one get a job related to their major? (which in this case is engineering)

Internships do take applicants in those year. They just don’t take as many as in later years. Go to your career fairs, apply to internships, and just see what happens. The worst that can happen is they don’t call you back. The best that can happen is you actually land one and are ahead of the game.

“You may not get an internship as a freshman or even as a sophomore, but the experience of making that resume, interviewing (hopefully) and seeing what is out there will make you a better candidate in the future. Start looking in the fall as that is when the game begins each year for summer internships.” - Great advise!

Don’t get discouraged applying to internships as a freshman - while it is definitely harder to get one since you have less experience, it’s not impossible. Freshman can get internships at big companies, and without parents getting it for them (I interned at a big company without my parents pulling strings the summer after my freshman year). Many companies may tell you to try again next year, but that’s ok. I would also suggest looking for summer research positions with a professor, as they might be more willing to take freshmen on. Hope this helps, and good luck!

Ideally, in high school. Otherwise, try to get one freshman year. And if you don’t get an internship, there should be other opportunities (like research) available.

Nobody gets any sort of actual engineering work in high school.

You’d be surprised, @bodangles

There aren’t a lot of opportunities, but the good ones provide a huge leg up.

I don’t believe it for a minute. What can you contribute to an engineering company with no experience or actual engineering coursework? What incentive is there to hire you over someone who actually kind of knows what they’re doing?

Maybe there are programs specifically to expose high schoolers to what being an engineer is like, but I don’t believe high schoolers are beating out college juniors for actual internships.

As an example, my kid, whose major is found in the civil engineering dept, did a construction-related unpaid internship with a nonprofit the summer after her freshman year. It was fantastic for giving her answers to interview questions, lots of team related experience, and was at least tangentially related to her major. This summer, after finishing a second year of school (and she is on pace to graduate early as well) she has a real engineering internship and had several internship offers for this summer. She has also worked on campus as a tutor, and done some team based work in a couple of classes that has been good experience and helped build her resume.
Anything you can do to give yourself experience working in teams, building excellent people skills, demonstrating leadership, developing marketable skills (CAD, etc), and showing you have a strong work ethic and the ability to get good results will be helpful for finding that first internship and later a job.
Work with your career center so you not only have these skills but can effectively communicate them to employers. Don’t wait on this. Prepare a resume and revise it every time you gain new experience. Visit career fairs and talk to employers. Attend on campus or other events where people in your field are likely to be. Get to know people. My D was given a free ticket to a fundraising event for a campus club that was sponsored by an engineering firm. A contact with a person from the firm made at that event later led to an internship offer.

@bodangles I’m referring to companies that have dedicated positions for high school students, not competing with college students for a position.

The programs aren’t common, but getting into a good one is a huge benefit. When I say a “good one”, I mean one where you do actual work. They do exist (I’m speaking from experience here).

I posted this on another thread, but this may help a bit.

Here are some tips I would recommend to set you in the right direction.

  1. Actively be involved in some clubs. Your first and second years are great for trying clubs and activities until you find the best fit. Even if you don't settle down on one club right away, showing on your resume the different projects you participated on definitely helps.
  2. If possible, take an officer or leadership position within a club or organization. Not only will you build leadership skills, but you'll definitely learn more and participate in more design work. This is because almost all organizations follow the 80-20 rule meaning that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. If you're in the 20% you'll learn much more, but you'll get much more out of it.
  3. Utilize your college's career center. I know fourth-year students who don't even do this. They're there to help you optimize your resume and hone your interview skills so use this resource wisely. I had ~15 drafts of my resume at the end of my first year. Update your resume, it should always be a work in progress.
  4. Network. I know this sounds cliche, but it definitely works. The best students don't always get the best positions, partially because they don't have the best interpersonal communication skills. Just talking with professors has helped me find out about multiple internships, scholarships, and research opportunities. It also helps to have killer letters of recommendation.
  5. Career fairs work well, meeting people face to face is much more rewarding and often works much better than sending resumes off into the abyss online. Some recruiters have even told me exactly how their system sorts out candidates and what keywords they look for.
  6. Learn how to write a good resume. (Hint: use your college career center). Like all pieces of literature, you will need to edit it many times. Take out that irrelevant fluff and highlight just the important content. Make sure the formatting is excellent. (Hint#2, look up the basic principles of graphic design). Challenge readers to find at least one mistake or one thing they dislike about it.

Lastly, think from the perspective of an ideal candidate. Do you think what you’re doing is what a NASA, Boeing, Apple etc. candidate would be doing?

Just my 2 cents, but it should help.

@r77r77 Do the clubs have to relate to the major you are in? like if you`re doing EE, should you be in a Robotics club? or can it be anything?

@Ajpat123, if you are an EE major, I would recommend joining IEEE. At least from my university (UCLA), they make top-notch projects throughout the year that really hone your experience in both hardware and software development if you are interested in that because they take part in competitions like Natcar and Micromouse. I personally didn’t join IEEE because it was a lot of time commitment, but it is one of the things that I wish I had done (I am a CS major though).

From my personal experience, you should start looking as early as possible. My biggest regret in terms of career opportunities was not looking during my freshman year. I came into college with no programming experience, so I told myself to take summer school and wait until my sophomore year because I felt I wasn’t ready when the career fair rolled around in Fall and Winter. Looking back, I missed out on a big opportunity to get greater exposure into software engineering. I was able to get an internship my sophomore year at Taboola and this summer as well at Apple, but I would have learned a lot more about the industry and could have possibly explored more aspects of software engineering if I interned my first year. Good luck!