Job and Internship Search
A job or internship search is a few hours a week sustained across months, which is a different kind of work than an assignment with a due date. Most of it is unglamorous, and most of it is repetition. You find postings worth your time, adjust your materials for each one, write to people who might know something, and keep track of what went where.
It is also genuinely tiring, and the tiring part and the tactical part are connected. Students who feel stuck are often stuck on something specific and fixable, whether that is applying at the wrong point in the year for their field, sending materials that have never been read by anyone, or putting every available hour into applications when those hours would return more spent elsewhere.
This page covers where to look, when to start, how to divide your time, and what to do when the search stalls. If you are earlier than this and still working out what you are looking for, Self-Reflection and Exploring are better starting points.
Already applying and not hearing back? Skip to When It’s Not Working.
On this page:
Where to Search
Handshake
Handshake is where employers who are specifically looking for Wesleyan students post, which makes it a different kind of resource from a general job board where you are competing against the entire internet. Thousands of jobs and internships are posted there each year, and the recommendations improve as you fill in your profile with your interests, skills, and location preferences.
Two features are worth setting up on your first visit. Wesleyan Collections group postings relevant to you, including on-campus jobs and the Wesleyan Affiliated Jobs and Internships collection, which holds roles posted by alumni, parents, and employer partners who came looking for Wesleyan students specifically. Saved searches with alerts email you when something matching your criteria is posted, which matters because many roles fill on a rolling basis and the earliest applications get the most careful reading.
Fill out your profile fully, and keep it up-to-date. More than ninety percent of Wesleyan students have a Handshake profile, and employers search those profiles directly. For roles that do not require a resume, your profile is the only thing an employer can evaluate.
LinkedIn is useful for two things that Handshake does not do as well: finding roles at organizations that never post to a university platform, and finding the people who work there. The Wesleyan alumni directory on LinkedIn lets you filter by employer, location, and field, so when you find a posting you can often find someone who could tell you about the team before you apply.
Industry-specific boards and organizations
Most fields have their own boards, and they are frequently better than the general ones because the postings are more current and the competition is smaller. Idealist for nonprofits, USAJOBS for federal government, higher education boards for academic administration, and dozens of others that vary by field. The Career Interests pages list the ones that matter in each area, and an advisor in your field can tell you which are worth checking weekly.
Professional associations in your field often post jobs to members, and student memberships are usually inexpensive or free. They also run conferences, which are among the more efficient ways to meet people who hire.
Organizations directly
If there are organizations you would particularly like to work for, check their careers pages directly and on a schedule. Smaller employers, especially nonprofits and startups, often post only to their own site, and many of them hire on short timelines where the posting is up for two weeks and filled by someone who saw it in the first three days.
When to Start
Timing varies more by field than anything else on this page, and getting it wrong is the most common structural mistake in a student search. The fields below run on genuinely different calendars, so find yours before you plan anything else.
Finance and consulting recruit furthest ahead. Applications for a given summer frequently open a full year beforehand, in the summer and early fall preceding it, and full-time offers at many firms go primarily to students who interned there. If this is your direction, you are working roughly a year ahead of your classmates, and beginning in the spring of the year you want to work means the cycle has already closed.
Technology and engineering at larger companies also recruit early, generally in the fall for the following summer, though the timeline is less compressed than finance.
Government and public sector roles move slowly for a different reason. The application process itself takes months, and federal hiring in particular involves long gaps between application and decision. Start early because the process is long, not because the deadlines are early.
Nonprofits, education, arts organizations, and most small employers hire close to when they need someone, often two to six weeks out. Looking in October for a June start will usually turn up nothing, because the role does not exist yet. The work in the fall and winter for these fields is building relationships and learning where postings appear, so that when they do appear in the spring you are ready and someone there already knows your name.
Research positions and labs vary. Wesleyan faculty often take students on for the summer, and those conversations happen informally in the spring. Outside programs like NSF-funded REUs have deadlines in the winter for the following summer.
If you do not know the timeline in your field, that is a good question to bring to an advisor or to ask in an informational conversation. It is also the sort of thing that changes, so information from a student two years ahead of you is more reliable than information from a website.
How to Spend Your Time
Applications feel productive because they are countable. You can submit fifteen in an afternoon and end the day feeling like you worked, which is part of why students whose searches are stalling tend to respond by applying to more things.
The arithmetic has shifted, though, because now that anyone can send fifty applications in an afternoon, fifty applications are worth considerably less than they used to be, and a substantial share of roles are filled through referrals and internal networks before they are ever posted. A candidate whose name someone at the organization recognizes moves faster through every stage of the process and is read more generously at each one.
Which is why we generally suggest a split closer to 60-40 in favor of conversations over applications. This is uncomfortable advice, because talking to people is slower and less measurable than submitting applications, and because it feels indirect. But the conversations are what turn a cold application into a warm one, and they are also how you learn which roles exist, which organizations are hiring in earnest, and what the work involves before you commit months to pursuing it.
The Networking page covers how to find Wesleyan alumni in fields you are considering, what to write in a first message, and what to ask. If cold outreach is the part you dread, GCC programs like WesLink and Cardinal Connections make the introduction for you.
A workable weekly rhythm during an active search: two or three hours finding and tailoring applications for roles you actually want, two or three hours on outreach and conversations, and thirty minutes updating your tracker and following up on anything outstanding. That is less time than most students imagine a search requires, and it is more sustainable across a semester than the pattern of doing nothing for three weeks and then applying to forty things in a weekend.
Strengthening Your Application
Tailor, but tailor efficiently. Every application should be adjusted for the role, and no application needs to be written from scratch. Most students end up with two or three base resumes for different types of roles, adjusted at the margins for each application, and a cover letter structure that changes in the specifics rather than the shape. The Resume Toolkit and the cover letter guide cover how to do this well.
Read the posting for what it is asking. Job descriptions are written by people trying to describe a role, and the two or three things they keep returning to are what they actually care about. Those are what your resume should be positioned around and what your cover letter should address.
Apply to things you are not perfectly qualified for. Posted qualifications are a wish list rather than a threshold, and employers routinely hire people who meet most of them. The pattern where students screen themselves out before an employer has the chance to is common and costly, particularly among students who are the first in their family to navigate this process. If you meet a reasonable share of what is listed and the work interests you, apply.
Get your materials reviewed before the volume starts. A resume with a structural problem does not become better through repetition, and a hundred applications with a weak resume is a hundred wasted applications. Peer Career Advisors offer drop-in review, which is the fastest route to a second pair of eyes.
On using AI. AI tools can genuinely help you understand a job description, prepare for an interview, or tighten a draft you wrote. What they do badly is write your materials for you, because the output reads as generic to anyone who reads applications for a living, and because you will eventually have to speak as the person who wrote it. The AI Career Toolkit covers where these tools help and where they hurt.
Keeping Track
After a few weeks of searching you will not remember which version of your resume went where, who you already contacted at which organization, or which application has been sitting for a month and deserves a follow-up. A simple spreadsheet solves all of it: organization, role, date applied, which materials you sent, any contact you have there, status, and what happens next.
The value is not organization for its own sake. It is that a tracker lets you see patterns you cannot see from inside the search, including whether you are getting interviews and failing to convert them, which is a different problem from not getting interviews at all, and requires a different fix.
If you already keep a networking tracker, keeping applications in the same file is worth doing, since the two are more connected than they look.
When It’s Not Working
Searches stall, and they stall for identifiable reasons more often than students assume. Before concluding that the problem is you, work through where the process is breaking.
No responses to applications at all. The likeliest cause is a materials problem or a targeting problem. If your resume has not been reviewed by an advisor or a PCA, start there. If it has, look at whether you are applying to roles that reasonably match your background, and whether you are applying cold to organizations where a conversation first would change the outcome.
Interviews that do not convert. This is a different problem with a different fix, and it is generally better news than the first one, since getting interviews means your materials work. Mock interview practice is the direct remedy, and the Interviewing page covers preparation in detail.
Nothing to apply to. Either you are looking in the wrong places, or you are in a field where the postings have not appeared yet, or the roles in your field are not posted publicly at all. All three are worth a conversation with an advisor, because the fix is different for each.
On rejection. Application processes are noisy. Organizations hire internal candidates they were always going to hire, freeze roles between posting and deciding, and pick between finalists for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. A rejection is information about one process at one organization at one moment, and students consistently read more into it than is there.
That said, searching is genuinely tiring, and doing it while carrying a full course load is harder than the timeline suggests. If it is wearing on you, that is not a sign you are doing it wrong. Talking to an advisor about strategy often helps more than another weekend of applications, and Counseling and Psychological Services is there if the weight of it is affecting more than your search.
Other Ways to Build Experience
A search does not have to be the only thing you are doing, and the alternatives below build the experience that makes your next search easier.
Forage offers free virtual work experience programs designed by employers including JPMorgan, BCG, Accenture, and dozens of others. Each takes five or six hours and walks you through tasks modeled on real entry-level work, which makes them useful both for testing whether a field interests you and for having something concrete to reference in an application. Because they are not employment, they are open to all students regardless of work authorization.
Parker Dewey hosts short-term paid remote projects, generally a few weeks of work for an actual employer. These are a reasonable way to build experience and a relationship at the same time.
Campus employment is valuable work experience, and the framing matters when you write about it later. A student who staffed the front desk at Olin or ushered at the CFA has handled responsibility, solved problems in real time, and worked with people who were counting on them, which is most of what entry-level employers are screening for.
Research with faculty is available to all students and in more departments than the sciences. Asking a professor whose work interests you whether they take student researchers is a short conversation with a large potential return.
Spotting a Fraudulent Posting
The GCC lists opportunities on Handshake as a service to students, and while we review postings, we cannot guarantee the legitimacy of every employer. Fraudulent postings do appear on university job boards, and they target students specifically. Knowing the pattern is the best protection.
Treat the following as warning signs:
- An offer arrives without any interview or substantive interaction
- An employer you have never contacted emails you about a job or a way to make money quickly
- The pay is unusually high for the work described
- You are asked to pay something upfront, or to wire or transfer money, or you receive a payment you did not expect
- You are asked early for your Social Security number, bank account details, credit card information, or copies of your passport or license
- The posting is missing basic information, including a company name, address, phone number, or an email address at the organization’s own domain
- The posting or the employer’s website contains spelling and grammatical errors, or the website has no clear description of what the business does
If a posting looks wrong, do not provide any personal information and do not click links in the message. End the communication and contact us at 860-685-2180 or careercenter@wesleyan.edu, and we will look into it and take it down if it is fraudulent. Reporting these matters beyond your own situation, since the same posting is usually reaching other students.
Get Help With Any of This
An advisor can help you figure out the timeline in your field, build a target list of organizations worth pursuing, review your materials before you send them anywhere, and work out what to change when a search is not moving. Book under your area of interest, and give yourself a couple of weeks during busy stretches. For a faster read on a resume or cover letter, Peer Career Advisors offer drop-in hours.
