A Student's Account of "Spring Into Action: Internships 101"

On February 7, I attended the Gemstone Academic Affairs Committee’s first event of their Spring Into Action series, Internships 101. Spring Into Action consists of multiple workshops throughout the semester that will help you with a wide variety of things, whether it’s academics or extracurriculars. Internships 101 covered just about everything you need to know about getting an internship and how to be successful at it.

There were two main parts to Internships 101. The first part consisted of six juniors and seniors discussing internship positions that they’ve held in the past. These ranged from research done for professors on campus to positions with companies across the country. They talked about many things that most people would not know of immediately. For example, there are plenty of places you can get an internship position. One option is to apply to numerous amounts of positions online and pick from the ones that accept you. Another is to look up the research that professors are doing on campus, and see if there are any that interest you. A good place to start is googling “UMD undergraduate research.” Professors are very willing to take students because we’re practically a free source of helping hands around their lab.

In the second half of the workshop, we broke into groups depending on our majors. Here, we mostly talked about how to get our resume to look its best. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my resume to the event, but for those who did, they were able to get quality feedback. You may think that your own resume is good as it is, but I looked over at those who were getting their resumes critiqued, and there were so many little details throughout the entire document that you would never expect would be important. If you weren’t at the event, then the good news is that you can still get resume help from the Career Center at the university.

Be on the lookout for Gemstone Academic Affair’s next event, where there will be food from around the world and information about studying abroad.

Felix Lee: Class of 2016