How To Find An Internship
And other job search tips for students
The struggle is real.
The competition is tough.
Your constant searching and applying haven’t gotten you very far.
So let’s break down the top tips I share with students on how to break out of the cycle.
Step 1: Broaden your search
If you’re relying on one or two job boards to find openings, you’re missing most of them. Most of the announcements for openings I see aren’t in the obvious places.
Step 2: Build your lists
Start an ongoing list of questions you want answered about the industry, the roles you’re targeting, and what success actually looks like in those jobs. If you think you already know the answer to something, write down your assumption as a question. Reference your research and use real context wherever you can.
Step 3: Make connections
Networking doesn’t have to mean cold calling strangers. Start by following recruiters, talent acquisition managers, companies you’re interested in, and students who are a year or two ahead of you. Then start engaging with their posts by liking and commenting. This gives you a much warmer introduction to key people over time and better access to openings when they do come up.
Step 4: Reach out
Remember that list of questions you’ve been building? Start putting it to use. Reach out to the professionals you’ve been following with one question from your list. Make it easy to answer and genuinely useful to you. Don’t dive into “Do you have any opportunities at your company?” Professionals like to help students but don’t want to feel used.
Step 5: Develop your relationships
As people respond (some won’t, and that’s fine), ease into a conversation. The goal over time is to get to the questions that really matter:
According to Ned Laff and Scott Carlson in their book Hacking College, the most important questions to ask are:
What keeps you up at night?
What would you want to see in someone’s background who’s looking to do what you do?
How important is this hands-on experience for this skill? or How important is this skill on the job?
How can I get that experience with you?
Step 6: Dial up your resume and portfolio to match
Pull at least five job descriptions for assistant-level roles. Then work through this:
☐ Identify every hard and soft skill mentioned. Your resume and portfolio need to speak directly to those skills.
☐ Hard skills belong in your skills section and should be demonstrated in your portfolio.
☐ Soft skills become bullet points under your experience. Written in a way that shows the skill in action, not just names it.
☐ Highlighting your most impressive work won’t cut it if it isn’t tied to what employers are actually asking for.
☐ Set aside the portfolio rules school taught you and spend time looking at real professional assistant-level portfolios. That’s your competition and your target.
☐ Show less process work and more of the skills the job requires.
For fashion design roles specifically:
Hard skills include technical flats in Illustrator or CLO, callouts and tech packs, mood and concept presentations, and color and materials boards.
Soft skills include presentation, communication, judgment, editing, and attention to detail.
Step 7: Share your work
Make your portfolio easy to find. Add links on LinkedIn, on your resume, anywhere a recruiter might land. Share it in a post. Tease out pieces of your work in smaller updates. The network you’ve been building in steps 3 through 5 is now your audience and will be interested to see what you’re up to.
Step 8: Connect job postings to your network
When a job posting comes up that interests you, don’t just apply and move on. Look at who in your network is connected to that company. Reach out directly to a recruiter, a talent acquisition manager, or someone in the function you’re targeting. A warm message alongside an application is always more effective than an application alone.
Step 9: Repeat
This isn’t a one-time effort. The students who land are the ones who treat the search like a consistent practice, not a series of one-off attempts.
A few things to keep in mind
Don’t overlook the people closest to you. Talk to your professors and your career center about who you should be speaking with. Ask them which companies might be a good fit for the specific skills you’re trying to develop. Your classmates are also an underused resource. If someone had a positive experience somewhere, you can leverage that to show genuine interest or even ask for an introduction. Most companies that host interns do it regularly.
What to do when you’re coming up short on skills
If you don’t have a skill in your portfolio that’s listed or implied, fill the gap.
Find a teacher, an online course, another student, or a professional who can help you get up to speed. And then post about it. Show employers that you can problem-solve and take responsibility for your learning.
Don’t suffer in silence. There’s more support around you than you probably realize. And if you want a neutral outside perspective on where to focus, reach out to me, and we can tackle all these steps together.
If you want to work through these steps with someone. Book a call here.
Check out my book, The Design Internship Handbook! It walks you through everything from finding internships to building materials that get you noticed. It’s the roadmap I wish I’d had when I was starting out.
Great suggestions! The details you list really matter.