Does it seem like every­one has an intern­ship this sum­mer?  Your best friend, your boyfriend, your best friend’s boyfriend, your pre­cep­tor, your preceptor’s boyfriend…just about every­one, that is, except you. If this is the case, don’t give up hope!

Many sum­mer intern­ships aren’t secured until April or May. It’s not too late to find the intern­ship that is the right fit for you. Stay focused,  search smart, and be bold. Here are some tips I found:

1. A lot of jobs re-open appli­ca­tions right about now. A lot of employ­ers, espe­cially in pub­lish­ing, media, and non­profit, may not even begin hir­ing until the spring months. Check out http://www.mediabistro.com/joblistings/default.asp?gdsr=1&=0&jbdr=10. It has a selec­tion of intern­ships in media—all posted recently.
2. Are you find­ing intern­ship with expired dead­lines? You can sort your search results by upcom­ing dead­lines in Tiger­Tracks and UCAN. When con­duct­ing your Tiger­Tracks search, go to the top bar of your intern­ship search results, put your mouse over “date posted” and click “Appli­ca­tion dead­line.” Or, go to UCAN and under “sort by:” at the top, select “dead­line.” UCAN still has over 1,300 sum­mer intern­ships you can apply for in a vari­ety of fields.
3. As you might imag­ine, four times as many peo­ple apply for paid intern­ships than for unpaid intern­ships on Internships.com. If are still con­sid­er­ing an unpaid intern­ship, now might be a good time to apply. Here’s a link to some other advice on find­ing intern­ships late in the game: http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2011/05/04/its-not-too-late-to-find-a-summer-job-or-internship
4. Keep a dis­cern­ing eye. Watch out for bogus intern­ships and stay focused on your goals. Try going to the pull-down tab at the top of the Career Ser­vices web­site and click on “Online Resources.” The “Specif­i­cally Intern­ships” page aggre­gates intern­ship search engines spe­cific to your inter­ests, indus­try, and pre­ferred loca­tion. Backdoorjobs.com is one of the most inter­est­ing links listed. This site lists adven­tur­ous, short-term sum­mer jobs, from safari guides in Alaska to Inter­na­tional vol­un­teer oppor­tu­ni­ties. Here’s a link to Career Service’s Online Resources, which is a good place to start: http://www.princeton.edu/career/about_us/online-resources/. And here’s a link on detect­ing a bogus intern­ships: http://www.wetfeet.com/advice-tools/internships/how-to-identify-a-shady-internship.
5. Don’t over­look net­work­ing as a way to tap into unad­ver­tised or non-posted intern­ships. Be sure to reach out to fam­ily, friends, alumni, and other pro­fes­sional con­tacts to explore poten­tial oppor­tu­ni­ties they may be aware of. To search the Alumni Careers Net­work for alumni in your field of inter­est, click here.

Lastly, to pull your “just-in-time” strat­egy together, sched­ule an appoint­ment to meet with a career coun­selor for per­son­al­ized guidance.

Best of luck!