Chapter 4, Musings of an internship applicant, Where to apply?

Chapter 4,  Musings of an internship applicant, Where to apply?

Enough of guidelines to prepare yourself before you click on the “send” button of your mailbox. So… you have completed with all your routine works or rather your homework to boost up your eligibility and capability as a potential applicant. But whom would you send your application to? Here comes the tragedy of the multimillion search results. As you go through the search results, you will find most of the internships as they call sometimes, as “summer-schools”, and you have to pay a whole lot of money to attend them which are basically worthless as per your intentions are concerned. Another kind of thing which you can find, that they are recruiting people for a long period, say for 1 year or so, which again will not serve your purpose. Thus you have to keep on filtering the search results and refine your search again and again. The process is extremely cumbersome is requires a lot of patience and searching skills. My job here is make your task as easier as I can, so I will suggest you some technical methods following which you can tame your search domain reasonably well and have full control over the search results.

Maintain a hierarchical database of your search results in separate folders. What I am trying to say can be better explained by the following figure: 

Each of the blocks represents a separate folder with, parent folders and subfolders as shown. This is a schematic diagram and you can incorporate more places to apply as you wish. This is an example to show you how you can organize properly, so that your time spent in searching are not wasted. In each of the target folder (leaf nodes), keep a file containing names of the persons of whom to apply, his mail id, webpage, research interests etc. Whenever you compose the mail intended for that person, you can once again see his research interests, browse through his cv and so on. This organization will save you a lot of time, as your search becomes much more localized.

Plan your search before beginning. For example, when you look for an opportunity at IIT Kharagpur, directly go to the respective departments homepage, check out those people whose research matches with your line of work. For companies, sometimes there are separate pages for internships, search for it. Also check whether they conduct any official summer internship program (for example, IIT Kanpur conducts SURGE, Summer Undergraduate Research Grant in Engineering) or student exchange program (MICTS, DAAD etc.).

Use Social networking sites, (Orkut / Facebook): These are indeed great tools which can help you to gather a lot of information, particularly from communities. You can also contact some of your seniors or fellow friends who have already done some sort of interns, to discuss and get ideas. If your senior is in some industry where you wish to apply for, you must talk to him before applying there. What more!! Best of luck and happy applying [ : D].