“How I Found a Summer Internship” – Evan Gabriel

Feeling discouraged by the supposed lack of English-related internships?  Hopefully this story by Evan Gabriel, a current UP senior, will lift your spirits!

 

UP’s School of Business requires all of their students to complete at least one internship before they graduate.  Just because the College of Arts and Sciences doesn’t require this doesn’t mean the opportunities themselves aren’t out there.  But for CAS students, internship opportunities don’t often simply fall into our laps. Still, my experience was a bit lucky: had I not received an unlikely invitation to an Easter dinner last spring and brushed shoulders with an unlikely contact, I probably would have never heard about the OEN (Oregon Entrepreneurs Network) Internship Fair sponsored by PSU.  I ended up finding an internship at this fair even though I was unsure about my ability, as a liberal arts major, to compete with business majors.

Yale Professor Charles Hill describes this commonly-shared notion as a “carapace” which acts as “an enveloping shell that hinders [students] from seeing the full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by the world.” Hill’s comment—quoted in David Brooks’s article “What Every College Kid Should Learn”—eloquently outlines the ignorance regarding liberal arts degrees that plagues both academic quads and company conference rooms today.

Despite the fact that America is technically out of a recession, I have friends holding crisp diplomas not even one year old—degrees in Engineering, BA’s in Business, even some who participated in E-Scholars—who remain unemployed. Given the fact that the solid, “fool proof” degrees in Electrical and Civil Engineering aren’t guaranteeing students jobs anymore, while I, an English major with expertise in a fairly recent version of Microsoft Word (2010, thank you!), was able to score a paid internship really says something about employers beginning to take chances on the particular skills English majors can bring.

The OEN Internship Fair was held in a small room with nearly 25 employers, ranging from photovoltaic companies who worked on solar power paneling in Kenya and the Sudan to social media firms in charge of launching platforms for various clients. Companies conducted interviews in the form of “speed dates” where firms met with three or four students for 10 minutes before a bell rang. This process allowed for students to meet with about eight companies. After a handful of interviews I met with the CEO of Inkstone, a local software startup company that develops iPad and iPhone e-book apps.

“Any writing experience?” he asked me.

“Oh sure, I’ve written lots. Journalism, fiction, non-fiction,” I rattled off as my excitement grew. But he appeared less than enthused.

“Code,” he clarified sternly. “HTML, XTML, Java… I am looking for programmers.”

Taken aback, I sat in silence as the students around me took turns chiming in with their coding experience and preferred languages. At the end of the dismal interview I sheepishly handed over a copy of my resume, expecting no fruit from the labor. Two weeks later, however, I received an email from the same CEO who had looked at me as if I had two heads. He was offering me a job. A few meetings later I began my summer internship from home, paid hourly to write sales copy, web content, press releases, and descriptions for Inkstone’s products.

What does this mean for college students trying to land paid positions in the next two years?  As David Brooks writes in “What Every College Kid Should Learn”: “you’ve got to burst out of that narrow careerist mentality.  Of course, it will be hard when you’re surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little sub-disciplinary empires.” Brooks stresses taking chances. As an English major I took a chance at an internship fair made up almost entirely of business and finance students. What I will advise, then, is that you consider fishing outside the pool of jobs that you to have been confined to because of your major. You may be surprised what bites.

 

Evan Gabriel is senior currently pursuing a degree in English Literature and German Studies at the University of Portland.