Hi! My name is Aagna Katrodia and am currently pursuing a Master of Science in Information Systems at the University of Maryland.
Currently, in my second semester, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about how to navigate looking for an internship for the summer and what steps need to be taken before you can start applying. I joined University of Maryland last August and since our orientation, we have been told about the importance of starting to apply early and making sure that you have your resumes and cover letters ready by the end of October. The formats for resumes and cover letters are provided by the Office of Career Services (OCS) at the Robert H Smith School of Business and these formats are clearly helpful in making sure that your documents are up to the Smith standard. From my experience, I feel that looking for a job or an internship in the United States highly depends on the amount of networking you can do and be in the right place at the right time. You have to build your network and reach out to people to see if there are any openings in any company. LinkedIn and Indeed are a great tool at your dispense for this purpose. In addition to that, OCS also provided us with an excel sheet which provided information about the job prospects of Alumni and the links to similar jobs.
Currently, the process that we are following consists of looking for internship positions on various job boards such as LinkedIn, Indeed, ejobs.umd and even Career4Terps, applying to these jobs, and reaching out to people (alumni) who are working at the company of interest and continuously working towards improving the resume and cover letters. It is quite an iterative process where you find new leads from already existing ones. There are also various career fairs and seminars held by the school where the companies visit the campus and the students can go talk to the representatives of the companies, get to know more about them and hand in their resumes. Every year, Office of Career Services organizes Terp Career Mixers where the students can do the same things too and additionally, meet with the Alumni of the Smith School of Business and try to get some tips and tricks about how to go ahead with the job position. OCS also provides us with small group coaching where they coach a group of 10-15 people on a variety of internship/job search related queries. The most recent ones are How to Find an Internship, Networking with ease and results, How to prepare for a winning interview and Navigating Career Fairs and Etiquettes.
In summary, you will have to work really hard to land a job or internship of your choice but if you have the right skills and experience for the internships/ jobs that you are applying for, then it is not so difficult. The best thing about the Smith School of Business is that we have a very huge alumni base and these are really helpful people – they have gone through the same process and they want to make it easier for you.