How to act during summer internship?

I want you to think really long and hard about what you are saying.

You are going into an interview for a journalism job, and you are leading (via your clips package) with "there's a document out there that would be better, but I made a token internet search to find it and didn't, so this inferior document will do. That's how I roll."

Do you see why maybe that's not what you want to do?

 

If a prospective employer doesn't want to hear the honest truth in the interview process, then I wouldn't want to work for them. It would end badly in the long run.

 

Are you talking about the wage demand during the interview? I think we covered that already. As I said, it wasn't even up to us; we just made the hire.

Going with hat in hand for more $ for the intern wasn't going to happen. Maybe there was some built-in leeway, but she was asking for more than there would have been.

 

That's fine. But if I plan on taking a different job if they offer me more money, and I tell you that, and that disqualifies me, then I don't want to work for you.

 

You can keep pointing that out, but it doesn't change the situation. And it wasn't a job; it was an internship. For a job, we would go to the money handlers if the person had some skill. For an internship? No.

Also, I have to say again that she was asking for a lot more, not just a little more. The money handlers certainly would have rejected that request. We do the interviewing; we don't control the cash.

 

There is a BIG difference between:

"I won't take this job for less than $X."

and

"If another job offers me more, I'll take that."

You seem to be taking the latter as the former.

 

Technically I made more that a "token" internet search, but point well taken. I still think a bit of leeway might be available on entry level jobs. Is the fact that you don't KNOW the placement of an article going to completely wipe away what ever my resume says or the content of my clips?

/starts to wonder why he's defending the approach that left him with a long stretch of unemployment.

 

Because in this job market, I can find someone with the same credentials as you who has done a better job putting together the package. I can probably find 10 someones like that.

Entry-level jobs are getting dozens of applications, easily. With that many, employers are going through looking for an excuse to trash-bin you just to thin the herd. Don't give them that excuse.

It's brutal out there. You can't be throwing away even the tiniest edge.

 

No. She said she would likely, but not definitely, take the other INTERNSHIP (you keep referring to a job; it wasn't a job) if it paid what she expected. That one wasn't even a newspaper job. We can't compete with manufacturing wages, especially when the place was offering significant OT pay.

Maybe that part wasn't clear, but I thought the reference to the place losing orders and laying off hundreds was good enough.

A lot of this is moot. She wasn't coming to work for us, and the place wasn't going to pay her what she wanted. My only question was whether to burst the bubble during the interview.

Like I said before, our financial requests were limited to jobs, not internships. For those, we would go and ask if the person had skills.

 

Hmmm, alright, I've got nothing. I wave the white flag. All the vim and vigor that powered my first set of responses has run it's course.

I'm now just left with the stark reality of how much time I wasted with poorly formatted internship applications (on job apps I'm pretty sure most of the ones better than where I landed went to people whose qualifications blew me out of the water).

I still think jobs should actually lay out what they're looking for in an application packet, but I guess that's just a losing battle.

 

You have your whole life to work in newspapers, kid. Well, at least until they roll over dead.

Get a summer job and enjoy your summer.

 

This is so important to understand, and so few do. People tend to overestimate the value of their clips or their experience as lead football writer for The College Daily or their last "internship" at The Podunk Press from back home, where they wrote 15 stories last summer for no pay but got to sit in a newsroom.

That's not to say those experiences haven't helped you immensely. But they're experiences that just about everyone has.

The key to applying for anything is to highlight why you're unique. What makes you more qualified than a pool of random applicants. Assume that you're going against highly qualified competition -- guys laid off after 10 years of solid service in the industry. Assume that you're going against people with inside connections. Then fight for that job.

And part of fighting for that job means making your presentation stand out. Use a design program for your resume. Make your clips clean, readable and even aesthetically nice -- if the story ran with a photo, put the photo in with the clip. Write a unique, memorable cover letter that is job-specific.

One piece of advice on clips -- use Photoshop and .PDFs of the actual pages if you can. It's very, very easy, and any designer at a student paper can probably show you how. Just pull up the PDFs of the pages the story ran, flatten the images, copy and past just the part of the page that features your clip into a document, and do the same with the newspaper's flag -- which has the date, etc. Your packet will look more professional as a result. For online clips, you should also include the website's "flag."

If you are applying for a job where online knowledge is important, it can be a great step to build yourself a resume site on WordPress or any of a number of other free sites. You can build a yourname.wordpress.com site that hosts your resume, clips, design samples and a blog that you maintain. Any Web-savvy friend should be able to help you.

If all this seems like a lot of work, it is. And no, it probably won't land you the job at the New York Times right out of college. But putting in this work will make you stand out from the rest of the field when you do apply for jobs you're qualified for. I've seen each of these methods pay off first hand.