Looking for an internship

Find an internship has not been easy. The internship coordinators had warned us from the beginning, an internship may even be found two weeks before the departure. But I did not expect that it requires such patience. Here are the main key moments of my research :

1. Writing of the resume and the cover letter in english & spanish

This step can take time and requires a lot of application, especially for me who came from a parallel admission and who did not participate in training workshops last year. Thanks to Mélodie Lebreton who often corrected mistakes I did, I could get one month later, acceptable resume and cover letter. I say "acceptable" because I am not a Spanish’native nor an American’native, so mistakes will always be there.

2. Make a list of companies in which we would apply

To optimize the search for an internship, you must be methodical and to go through this step. To find companies or internship offers several solutions were possible:

- Go to the intranet and see the previous internship done by the ECE’s students

- The Website Kompass

- The network (always activate your network but do not count only on it in order to avoid unpleasant surprises)

- Others websites with internship offers (Animafest. ..)

- Internship offers given by the International Relations Office

3. Customize resumes and cover letters

You might be tempted to send the same document to all the companies for the internship but it's really a bad idea. Customize the cover letter by simply putting the name of the head of department, or to introduce a paragraph about the company can be a bonus and can demonstrate your motivation.

Same for the resume, it is always appreciate to change the title by sector of activity .

4. Send your application

For this step, you must be careful about what you’re sending into not sending anything anyhow. To do this, it is important to be organized in order to not mislead. Indeed, I created on my laptop an internship’folder, divided by countries and companies. But despite that, I managed to make a mistake and send a customized application for a company of events to an audit firm.

In addition it is important to well named the documents sent to the company because the company receives hundreds of requestsper days, therefore, name a document only "cover letlter" is not recommended. It would be better to name it (in English or Spanish, depending on the destination) "cover letter_surname first name_name of the company).

5. Find an internship

This is the longest step. Do not think you can find your internship in an heartbeat, especially if you want an internship in a specific area in a specific country. I remember at the start of September everyone had strong views: "I want to work in a diamond factory in India", "I want work in events in USA." As the weeks passed, these statements changed to: "I just want to go to the USA, regardless of the sector." And for the unlucky like me who had not Internship at the end of November, it was mostly "No matter the country, no matter the sector, I just want an internship." All that to say that we must persevere, and write to the companies again and again . There will always refusals but don’t be discouraged and above all continue to send request and to revive the the companies.

Attention , you haven’t an internship as the agreement is not signed! An acceptance mail does not guarantee the internship thus you have to keep looking for an internship until the agreement is not signed.