Students often ask CheersYou（清柚教育）
“How should I plan my internships throughout college?”
“Where can I find internships?”
“What kind of internships are right for me?”
With so many questions coming together
CheersYou（清柚教育） interviewed peers with experience in "business"
and summarized the timeline for four-year internship planning~
Freshman Year
Here, CheersYou（清柚教育） suggests starting to think and plan about career direction from freshman year. Business-related job paths are so many; go online or check information about where previous graduates went. Understand what positions are available in each path, what the job content and nature are, which companies are industry representatives, and what the current status and future development of the industry look like. These questions require your own effort to research and understand during your spare time.
At the same time, start building awareness of enriching your resume. Specifically, from freshman year, you should be conscious of preparing for your future path after four years. First, build up the framework of your resume. With a framework, or rather some blank spaces, you will have a plan for your college life, knowing in which areas to exert effort and accumulate.
One point to mention is that during the freshman year, besides accumulating knowledge and practical skills, you can also accumulate what is called alumni connections. You can pay more attention to alumni lectures held at your university, or even activities like class reunions of a certain year's graduates. Attending lectures or volunteering at event venues are both good ways to get close to alumni. Generally, alumni from your own school are very friendly. If during the interaction you let alumni see that you have greater awareness and earlier planning than your peers, as well as passion for certain things and social skills, they can become a very important resource for you in finding your first internship in sophomore year.
Although what alumni provide may not be a formal internship but perhaps just a personal assistant role, the experience and insights you gain while helping out can be very valuable.
Sophomore Year
By sophomore year, it's best to have a specific field you want to try. At the same time, with more than a year's accumulation, including knowledge accumulation and the practical skills trained in student organizations, you can boldly apply for internship positions. You can utilize the alumni resources mentioned earlier or some social resources from your own family to start interning. Of course, if the results of applying to your desired company are not ideal, I suggest finding some good stepping stones. For example, the Big Four, referring to the Big Four accounting firms: EY, KPMG, PwC, and Deloitte. One reason is that these firms have a huge global reputation; second, their business scope in the commercial field is very broad, although predominantly accounting and auditing, they also have positions in many other lines; third, these firms are very friendly to underclassmen, even designing training programs specifically for sophomore and junior students.
Junior and Senior Years
In junior year, you can intern at different companies within a specific field. For example, if you choose the consulting industry, complete a few part-time project assistant internships at tier-1 and tier-2 firms.
Tips
One key point to emphasize is early planning, which is very important. With early planning, you start off one step ahead of others. Even if you are a slow learner, you can overtake others through continuous learning and accumulation. Because a concept that teachers always convey is that college students or prospective college students must plan their career paths in advance; otherwise, they may become indulgent and lazy in college, idling away days playing games in their dorms and wasting time.
Three Key Points for Writing Your Resume
Goal-oriented:
Writing a resume is not to show off how awesome you are, but to make the interviewer feel that you are qualified for the position. Specifically, you need to understand what qualities and abilities the position you're applying for requires, and reflect them in your resume. So, please sort through your past experiences, write a summary for each, and add several tags. For example, experience in business competitions can be tagged as analytical skills for consulting interviews, teamwork and leadership for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) interviews, and communication skills when applying for sales positions. Different tags correspond to different stories and descriptions; which one to use depends on the industry and the position. In short, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Tell stories with data:
Use numbers, not adjectives. Everyone can say they "love reading, love traveling, enjoy sports," but a phrase like "read 300 books during college, traveled to 18 cities across the country, won the intramural basketball championship" is clearly more persuasive. Compared to "successfully organized the campus top ten singers event, which received enthusiastic participation from students," saying "led 12 officers of the arts department to hold the campus top ten singers competition, which lasted 2 months over 3 rounds, attracted 300 registrants, and had a total audience of over 10,000" is far more compelling.
Needless to say, revise repeatedly. That means polishing content, grammar, format, layout, and even punctuation meticulously. Show it to different people to get various suggestions for changes. Show it to someone you don't know and ask for their first impression. The result of such revisions will surely be an increasingly attractive resume.
Formatting and Layout:
Can directly influence the first impression HR has of your attitude.
Another point is resume submission. There can be internal referrals that put your resume directly on the HR's desk, but you might also be screened out based on the email format or the mailing requirements. It is crucial to carefully read and strictly follow the company's required submission method. Here, let's mention, for instance, when sending an email, don't just attach nothing else. Seniors suggest highlighting in the email body a few points from your experience that best match the job requirements, and expressing some passion for the company, as well as showing that you have the time and ability to ensure the internship commitment, etc.
Embellishing your internship in applications:
For programs with high quantitative requirements: emphasize in your application documents how much data you handled during your internship and what data processing software you are proficient in.
If the program favors students with leadership & cooperation skills: then write more about the group tasks you've done, what you did in them, what role you played, and how you handled team collaboration.
In your PS and essays, connect your internship experiences: mainly using transitional phrases like "During this internship, I realized my shortcomings / developed an interest in xxx, so I..." to show step-by-step planning.
The main points of alignment are "my abilities and qualities make me a qualified candidate for the program," and "the program will help me achieve my career goals."
In interviews, they may ask you to go through your resume, or they might ask about a particular internship that interests them.
Details: what you did, how you did it, what difficulties, and how you overcame them.
Challenging: your understanding of the industry, your understanding of the company. Why do you think the most impressive internship was impressive.
Some small tricks involve embellishing and packaging yourself, adding some exaggeration and emphasizing strengths while hiding weaknesses.
Concept elevation: making what you did sound grander, for instance, calling a questionnaire survey an "evaluation system," or distributing flyers described as "street investigation," etc.
Concept substitution: for example, claiming that what the group did was done by you, or exaggerating your role in the group. Because there are countless applicants, most students do similar things in college, you need to catch the admissions officer's attention and make them think you are unique and stand out.
Of course, these tricks come with risks; you might slip up and give a bad impression due to dishonesty. So be confident but not too greedy.
In Summary
Make a good plan
and execute it in an orderly manner
without procrastination
without laziness
that's what we need to keep learning throughout our four years of college~
