Summer Internships: Application Anxiety

@srz

I’ve been applying to 2021 summer internships since September of 2020. My Google Drive is filled with cover letter drafts, rewrites, and a million different combinations of writing samples. As the school year progressed, my cover letter collection grew but no company extended an offer. I took the rejections from places like the Washington Post and CNN in stride; thousands of students had applied, especially given that most positions are remote this summer, and it was nothing personal. But the internship process took me to a mental space similar to when I was applying to college. I was constantly scrolling on LinkedIn and filled with jealousy when I saw my peers receiving prestigious internship positions. I was addicted to checking my application dashboards and the habit became borderline obsessive. All in all, not a good look for me. 

Full disclosure, I have an internship this summer with Ballotpedia.org and I’m extremely grateful and lucky to have snagged the job (shameless plug: go check out the website, it’s basically the encyclopedia of American politics). This article is more a reflection and comment on the stress summer internship applications have become over the past three years and the belief that students must secure internships at major companies. 

As a journalism student, most of my applications were sent to major media outlets where it was seemingly impossible to get a job but, at the same time, where seemingly all my peers were able to get the same positions I was denied. The series of rejection emails and viewing everyone else's updates pushed me into a mini spiral. I thought I would never achieve anything in my professional career and believed I was a fundamentally poor student, writer, creator, etc. These thoughts harkened back to my senior year of high school where college rejections sparked similar thoughts─ “I’m not as smart as my friends,” and “I’m not going to accomplish anything unless I get into a top 10 school.” The pressure to jump into any career field immediately at the top is absurd. When college students are looped into a sea of other brilliant, hardworking peers with immaculate resumes, it can feel like a hopeless endeavor. The pressure to have an internship with national news brands eclipses the amazing local opportunities available.

It is difficult to reckon with feeling like a “low caliber” internship is unsuitable when in fact no internship is a failure and not getting an internship is also not a failure. It is so easy to slip into a black-and-white mindset where getting an internship equates success and not securing one equates failure. But, like most opportunities for rejections, the situation is not so cut and dry. Similar to applying to college, if a student doesn’t didn’t get into his or her first (or second or third) choice school that does not mean they failed. These rejections are, instead, opportunities. Social media and the internet in general provide different ways to create your own content and build professional skills through creating TikTok videos, writing for Medium, or even starting a cooking Instagram. 

I know the whole “rejections are really opportunities” bit sounds cheesy, especially coming from someone with an internship. It may even sound superficial. But, if you didn’t get an internship this summer, you have an internship you’re not thrilled about, or if you’re stuck in an “I’m-not-good-enough” spiral, remember that you are a bad witch! That company is majorly missing out on all you have to offer! You are capable of building skills and creating content without an official job title. Go out there and prove it to every company that rejected you that they made a big mistake and, more importantly, prove it to yourself.

By Marla Hiller

La Croix obsessed, coffee addicted, podcast fanatic.