Every college student faces this issue. You realize you need to get a summer internship because one, you want to beef up your resume, and two, you want some experience in your field. You have high hopes and dreams for your internship search, but little do you know, those hopes and dreams are going to fall onto a nice slab of concrete and shatter into a million pieces.
You click on the first internship opportunity you see, read the description and say “Aww, I would be perfect for this job!” You read further on down and take a look at the requirements. You heart breaks in two. It says that you need to have at least five years of experience in the field in order to even have a shot at getting the internship.
First of all, how can you have five years of experience if they are only in college?! I mean, an internship is what people do to get experience! So, you realize you have no hope. It’s like you just met your true love, but then realize he wasn’t so true after all.
You try multiple other internship offers, but realize you aren’t eligible for basically all of them. Why? Well, you aren't proficient in Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe After Effects, you haven't performed market research, you don't know what the crap javascript is, and you haven't done a lick of HTML coding. "Well, excuse me for living a normal life and putting my education first. I just haven't had time to learn it yet!", you may be saying. Nowadays, it seems like businesses expect us to know this type of knowledge when we come out of the womb.
You start to get desperate. You decide to cut out the middle man and contact companies directly through their email. What a brave soldier! In your email, you practically beg the company to take you under their wing. You try to sell yourself, but it doesn’t do any good. How do you know? Well... three months has passed and they haven’t even replied to your email.
You try to shrug it off, but simply get annoyed. You’d think they would have the decency to reply to a poor, desperate college student. After all, they were once in your same position.
After months and months and months and months....and some more months of looking for an internship, you decide to give up. Maybe you can get a student based job instead? Haha, good luck honey. I've tried that too.
You know what the qualifications are for a student job? Well, let me just put it this way: they refuse to hire you because they don't want you just for the summer. They want to hold you as their personal prisoner for ever and ever. "But I have to go back to college in the fall!" They don't care. Now if they are willing to hire you during the summer, that is usually because they pay next to nothing and will assign you the glorious task of filing. Now, if even this is not true...well I'll be darned, you've found the jackpot!