No Summer Internship? Here’s What You Can Do

internship

So you have applied for internships but haven’t been accepted by any of the companies as of yet. You might feel that your world is falling apart. It’s okay. It’s perfectly fine if you feel insecure at young age. But it’s not fine if you laze around and do not take advantage of your summer vacation.

Here are few things that you could do instead of an internship at a fortune 500 company:

Start a blog

You could choose a project on a topic that you already have interest in, and start a blog. It’s easy to start a blog these days – just head to WordPress.com or tumblr.com and set up a blog. If you need more control over your environment it’s better to start a blog on WordPress.

Set a deal line on what you want to achieve and plan it out appropriately till the last week of your summer vacation.

Starting a blog can teach you following things:

– Learn how to write. Everyone can write, but when you start a blog, you need to attract audiences. And you will be able to do only if readers find something useful on your blog. Or if you are able to churn out stories that get readers hooked.

– Learn how to engage an audience. You will start learning how to do this once you start writing frequently. It needs discipline to achieve this. It’s okay if you didn’t get many readers to click on your first blogpost. When I first started my first blog, I had just 50-100 visitors a month. But it quickly grew to 100k visitors a month within 6 months. Patience and persistence equipped with good content can do wonders.

Travel

This is one of the most common advice to youngsters and yet very under-utilised. Traveling opens up perspective. Traveling gives you self-confidence and courage that no other activity can give you. One of the reason companies love hiring people who travel is because they know these are go-getters. These are the people who will make things happen and if others can’t do it for they will do it themselves.

Today, there’s too much pressure to do a Europe tour. It’s not necessary that you have to go out of the way and spend a lot of money on it. You could choose a destination nearby within your country and travel. The benefit do not wary much.

Remember the self-confidence I talked about earlier? It will allow you to approach strangers whom you might not have approached otherwise. This skill is really useful when you get in the work world. If you have the confidence to project yourself and talk to strangers, you will benefit incomparably.

Which other project will give you these many skills in such few days?

To sum it up. Traveling will teach you:

  • How to be self-confident
  • How to get shit done
  • How to approach people
  • How to be humble

Contact small companies

When students talk about internship most of them talk about big companies and don’t I fact want to work in a small or medium sized company. Sure, there are benefits of working in a large scaled company – there’s a chance that you might get hired in the same company once you graduate. But interning at a small company or a startup has its own benefits.

For starters you won’t just be bringing coffee for your seniors. When you work for a small company or startup, be assured that you will be assigned some sort of work. The amount of learnings you will get from working in a small company will be way more than working in a large company.

At a small company you can put forward your ideas and be assured that at least you’ll be heard.  If your idea is liked, they might even you in charge of it. The opportunity for you to shine is much higher.

The good thing about small companies is that it’s easier to get in touch with decision makers. You can contact them Twitter, LinkedIn or drop them a mail. Most small companies have a team page on their website and list their decision makers along with either email addresses.

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Work with an NGO

If none of the above possibilities work for you, you could contact an NGO. Most NGOs are looking for capable youngsters. The benefits of working with an NGO are again similar to what working at a small companies.

An addition to it, you can also get an additional satisfaction of purpose because these organisations are actually making a change in the society. When you intern at an NGO you can literally make a dent.

Take an online course

One of the reason you didn’t score an internship with your dream company could be that you don’t have enough skills. Why not work on improving your skills? These days there are a bunch of online courses you can take. Some of the sites offer free course content or charge very little.

If you want to learn that marketing techniques, there’s a course out there. If you want to start building your apps yourself and want to start learning how to code, there’s an app out there.

You could also learn a new language. Let’s not put let your dream to pick up French dates be a dream. You have time on your hands and you 3-4 weeks is enough for basic understanding of a language.

Start your hunt for skills from following sites:

Coursera
Udacity
Udemy
Codeacademy
Codeschool
Memrise
Duolingo

There’s no excuse to laze around in your bed when there’s so many options out there to spend your summer. What are you doing this summer?

At Nomadcareers.com we have decided to contact companies who offer internship throughout the year. If you are looking for an internship, just visit our main page and filter for jobs section for internship. Subscribe to our mailing list where we will send you jobs right to your mail box. Every week.

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If you’re an employer who wants to hire interns, we offer you free job posts packing. Just use code”FRNOMAD” to post internships on the site for free.

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