Remote Internships Are Still Valuable...If Employers Meet Students Halfway
Weekly Article

Aug. 5, 2020
A virtual Zoom background of an organized, clean office space disguised the Tiffany-blue walls and middle school photos in rising Rutgers University junior Natalie Powell’s childhood bedroom. Three weeks into her software engineering internship at a Fortune 500 company, Powell was demonstrating a new web application at a virtual meeting. Yet during her presentation, she heard incessant knocking at her bedroom door.
“My dad was asking if I was okay, and I couldn’t answer, so he kept knocking and then eventually I told him to come in. I said I was on a call and everyone was laughing when I got back on camera. I think sometimes my parents forget I’m working a nine-to-five,” Powell said.
Many college students count on internships for networking opportunities and clarity on career trajectory—and often value them more highly than coursework. But when COVID-19 cases exploded across the United States in mid-March, all of those opportunities for professional growth were thrown into uncertainty. Some internship programs were axed early on in the pandemic. But as more workplaces made the shift to remote work, so, too, did internships.
Sean Ji, a rising junior at the University of Chicago who resides in Northern Virginia, began a remote internship at a small tech startup working with the supply-chain management industry this summer. He says remotely interning proposes networking challenges—especially as he enters new terrain as an economics and political science major in a primarily tech-centered field.
“I think sometimes my parents forget I’m working a nine-to-five.”
“Since I'm not in the physical location, I can't really find people as easily and grab coffee if I want to talk to them,” Ji said. “I think my boss has done a pretty good job with helping me reach out to people that I might want to talk to about what the industry looks like.”
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 53 percent of college graduates surveyed at Endicott College in 2015 indicated that post-graduation positions were directly obtained from previous internship experiences. That same study from NACE found that students graduating with internship experience under their belts were more likely to find employment upon graduation.
Workforce circumstances look vastly different from that of five months ago, but one thing hasn’t changed: employers still want enthusiastic interns who they could see as full-time employees. However, they now have the extra hurdle of digitizing traditional infrastructures that would provide students with career guidance while making a more concerted effort to formalize what might have been casual office conversations.
Some companies, like the one where Powell interns, are taking the steps necessary to keep the internship experience a valuable one. For example, her company encourages constant contact between staff and interns through internal mobility seminars. Interns can also be matched with future company openings during recruiter office hours.
Anna Connelly, an intern at a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C., said that every Friday the executives and staff members in her office hold virtual professional development seminars for the interns. Topics vary from a staffer’s specialization in a specific area of communications to strategies for writing op-eds. These were in-person meetings in pre-COVID times, she said, but the presentations moved online to accommodate the firm’s new working situation.
“They give us a roadmap of their career and general advice while allowing us to network with them,” Connelly said.
Networking, the bedrock of every college student’s career search, has shifted from water cooler conversations to formal meetings. Through informal 30-minute phone calls with professionals in his direct manager’s network, Ji not only gleans information about roles in fields related to supply-chain management, but he also gets to build relationships across industries.
“I end up having other, non-career related [conversations]. A lot of it is just being open to having conversations not about work because they also want to talk about things that are not work related,” Ji said.
Despite not being in the workplace with in-person supervision, remote interns are finding ways to turn independence into opportunities to demonstrate self-starter skills.
Workforce circumstances look vastly different from that of five months ago, but employers still want enthusiastic interns who they could see as full-time employees.
“I’ve been able to reach out to additional associates and ask for extra projects if they want me to take care of them,” Connelly said. “It’s nice to be able to demonstrate my initiative to other people that I wouldn’t necessarily have direct supervision by before.”
But for students who feel lost amid abrupt campus closures and an uncertain job market, career services at some universities are allaying anxieties by providing students with resources. Associate Director for Industry Coaching at the George Washington University Center for Career Services Nicole Kolt reassured students about dreaded summer resume gaps.
“Employers want to know that you are using this time to do something, whether that’s building an industry skill or reflecting on your career goals,” Kolt said.
To help connect students who lost internship opportunities with remote experiences, the center is utilizing a platform that connects companies with GW students for paid “micro-internships.” Students can take on various short-term projects in tech, finance, marketing, and other fields by browsing through company postings on the platform’s job board. Each project varies in length, but most run between one week to a month.
But it’s important for students to keep in mind that employers are aware of the current circumstances and limited opportunities. It’s easy to forget that struggling during this time is normal—everyone across the world is feeling the weight of this pandemic. When this “COVID generation” comes into adulthood and the workforce, it goes without saying that this summer might not fit the expected internship mold.
After all, the same managers hiring this generation are the ones carving out time and formal opportunities to make sure interns get an equally enriching experience working from their childhood bedrooms as they would have had in a corporate office. Taking the time to work with a new company, learn how the organization operates, and getting introductions to those working in the field (albeit virtually) are still valuable aspects of a college student’s professional development. They just happen to take place in a different setting than what many of us, this remote intern included, expected.