Much like my student employment search over a year ago, the internship search has certainly been a trip. To start off, the University of Iowa has a number of resources to aid students in a job or internship search. There’s the Pomerantz Career Center and the Job & Internship Fair. The career center will help you with anything from resumes, cover letters, and letters of introduction to interview prep and practice. Not to mention, they are a great resource if you do not know where to start. The Career Center also puts on the Job & Internship Fair which pulls over a 150+ employers and all of the graduate schools from the University of Iowa.
Due to my own blunders, I have not been able to attend the Job and Internship Fair during my semesters here. It is held once a semester, always on a Wednesday, and usually from 11AM-4PM.
And I always have class.
The fair is one of the more traditional ways of finding an internship. Being a political science major and being subscribed to student organization emails, the UDemocrats presented an interesting opportunity: Congressman Dave Loebsack’s Iowa City office was still searching for another intern. It had a minimal time requirement (~10 hours), unpaid, and purely made to gain experience.
While the unpaid part may sound disappointing, it’s the experience part that is key. There are thousands of stories of college graduates who have never held a job and are struggling to find work because employers want experience. The internship sounded more than okay to me: it hit my interest in politics, my desire to gain experience working within a political office, and it was something I could put on my resume if given the job. So I applied. All I had to do was send in my resume and wait.
Luckily, I received a reply from their staff within a day. They wanted an interview and offered up some potential dates and times.
I dressed in my best business casual and went out to meet a member of their staff for the interview. It was rather open ended. They wanted to know why I wanted the internship, what my relevant experience was (thankfully, I had volunteered to canvass neighborhoods for the Hillary Clinton campaign prior to to the caucus), and any details about myself or experiences that would make me a beneficial intern. Between my experiences of canvassing and my involvement with No Labels, I had plenty to talk about and use to sell myself. And I did it successfully. By the end of the interview, I was offered the position as an intern. Now, within my first week, I’ve done a little bit of work for them and I’m excited to see where this experience takes me.
