How to get an internship: a step-by-step plan for students

What are the steps to get an internship?

Getting an internship is mostly a matter of method. These eight steps work for summer internships, vacation work, placement years and co-ops, in any field. They assume you have a few months; if your deadline is close, compress the first three steps into a weekend.

• 1. Decide what you want the internship to do for you: learn, test a career, collect evidence, meet people.
• 2. Build a list of 15 to 25 target organisations from at least four sources: your careers service, company websites, job boards, career fairs, lecturers and speculative approaches.
• 3. Score each target from 1 to 5 on learning, role fit, practicality, pay and future route, and weight the scores to match your priorities.
• 4. Prepare a student CV built on evidence, and six to eight STAR stories with results.
• 5. Send about two tailored applications a week, logging each one the same day.
• 6. Follow up once after silence, practise the test types your targets use, and prepare for each interview.
• 7. Review your numbers every Friday: applications sent, follow-ups due, interview rate.
• 8. Check every offer in writing, compare what each one really costs you, and reply in writing.

Where do you find internships?

Use several sources, because each finds different organisations. Your university careers service lists employers that already recruit students like you and can review your CV. Company websites carry roles that never reach job boards. Job boards give breadth. Career fairs let you ask what the work is really like. Lecturers and supervisors often know small firms, laboratories and alumni.

Speculative applications deserve more attention than they get. Small organisations often take interns without advertising, and a short, specific email to a named person, with a CV attached, may be the only application they receive that month. Ask whether they take interns, say what dates you could do, name one piece of their work that interests you and offer a 15-minute call.

How do you choose which internships to apply for?

Before you write a single cover letter, score each target. Rate it from 1 to 5 on five questions. Learning: will you do real work with someone who will teach you? Role fit: does the work match your course and strengths? Practicality: do the dates, location, hours and visa conditions work for you? Pay: can you afford it? Future route: does the organisation hire graduates or build skills others want? Multiply each score by a weight that reflects your priorities and add them up.

With weights of 30% learning, 25% role fit, 20% practicality, 15% future route and 10% pay, a target scoring 5, 5, 3, 4 and 3 gets a fit score of 4.25. Treat 3.8 and above as your Priority A list: research these properly and tailor every application. Treat 3.0 to 3.8 as Priority B and tailor the key paragraphs. Below 3.0, apply only if you have time. If you cannot afford an unpaid placement, give pay a bigger weight: the score should reflect your life, not someone else's.

Scoring takes about five minutes per organisation and saves hours later, because it tells you where to spend your best effort and stops you applying to roles that never fitted.

How many internship applications should you send?

There is no universal number, because response rates differ hugely by field, country, season and employer size. A better question is what pace you can sustain while doing each application well. For many students that is about two tailored applications a week, which gives roughly 24 over a twelve-week search.

Then let your own numbers guide you. After about ten applications, look at your interview rate: applications that reached any interview, divided by applications sent. If it is very low, the problem is usually earlier in the process (targets, CV or letter), so send better applications rather than more. If you are reaching interviews but not offers, work on stories, tests and the assessment centre.

What does a worked example of the numbers look like?

Here is an illustrative example based on the composite student in our kit, a third-year mechanical engineering student. He sent 16 applications over about four months. The first seven were mostly generic; the next nine were mostly tailored after a Friday review. The table shows how to calculate the numbers that matter. One person's search proves nothing about averages; the point is the method.

How do you write a CV and cover letter with no experience?

Most students have more evidence than they think: projects, laboratory and field work, society roles, tutoring, volunteering, part-time jobs and personal projects. The skill is describing them as evidence. A strong bullet has a verb, what you did, how, and a result: 'Traced a recurring stock mismatch to a duplicate product code; the manager merged the codes and the monthly variance stopped' says far more than 'responsible for stock counts'.

Decode each advert into its essential and desirable requirements, in its own words, and match each one to a real example. Lead your CV with the section that best matches what they ask for. Keep the cover letter to three paragraphs: why this organisation specifically, two pieces of evidence for their top two requirements, and what you want to learn and will bring. Write it yourself, follow any instructions the employer gives on AI use, and make sure every claim is true, because you will be asked about it.

How do you prepare for internship interviews and assessment centres?

Most interview questions ask for an example. Prepare six to eight short, true stories using the STAR structure: situation and task in a sentence each, most of the time on what you did, and a result you can prove. Cover teamwork, problem solving, communication, leadership, resilience, technical skill, initiative and integrity. Practise them out loud with a timer.

Online tests reward familiarity: practise the same types under the same timing. At assessment centres, assessors usually watch how you work with others as much as what you conclude, so propose a way to use the time, build on others' ideas, bring in quieter people and summarise before the end. If you have a disability or health condition, you can ask for reasonable adjustments; your careers service can advise on how this works where you are.

What should you check before accepting an internship offer?

Get the offer in writing and check that it states the role, dates, hours, pay or stipend and how it is paid, location, your manager, what you will work on and any confidentiality terms. Ask politely about anything missing. Then work out what the offer really leaves you with: pay minus rent, travel, food and one-off costs. A distant, better-paid offer can still cost you money overall.

Pay rules differ by country. In the United States, the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 71 explains a 'primary beneficiary test' for whether an intern at a for-profit employer is an employee owed minimum wage. In the United Kingdom, GOV.UK guidance says entitlement to the National Minimum Wage depends on whether someone is a worker, not on the label 'intern', with an exemption for students on placements of up to one year required by a UK further or higher education course. In India, AICTE's internship policy sets out internships within technical programmes. International students should check study-visa work conditions with their university before accepting; UK university guidance, for example, explains when a placement can be done on a Student visa. Ask your careers service if anything looks wrong, and never pay a fee for a placement.

What are the most common internship search mistakes?

• Sending the same CV and letter to every advert.
• Keeping no record of what you sent, where and when.
• Leaving applications until the week before deadlines.
• Skipping practice for timed online tests.
• Telling stories with no result or with 'we' instead of 'I'.
• Accepting an offer by phone with nothing in writing.
• Ignoring the true cost of an offer in another city.
• Letting an AI tool write application text you cannot explain in an interview.

How do you make the most of an internship once you start?

Getting the internship is half the job. In your first week, ask two good questions a day and request a short meeting to agree three to six learning goals, each with evidence and a target week. A useful way to mix them is the 70-20-10 idea: mostly doing real work, some learning from people, a little formal learning. Jobulary's explainer on the 70-20-10 model covers where the idea came from and its limits.

Then keep a fifteen-minute log every Friday, ask for specific feedback, and prepare your midpoint and final reviews from that evidence. Ask in writing before you put any work in a portfolio. In the final two weeks, ask once, calmly, how the organisation recruits graduates or returning interns, and whether your manager would act as a referee. If you want an independent record of your employability skills afterwards, AssessAll's Graduate Employability Skills Assessment with a Portable Record is one optional route. Bodhih Training's Internship and Placement Kit packages the tracker, forms, templates and log in one place if you would rather not build them yourself.