How to Land a Summer Job

Written by Lauren HartmanPhotography by Calder Sell It’s that time of year. The snow is gone, midterms are winding down, terrace chairs have been brought back out. The hushed, cautiously optimistic tone with which we talk about summer has become increasingly less tentative, although it is still undercut by hints of butfirstweneedtosurvivefinals. Which means… summer jobs are on the horizon. Some students get fancy corporate internships where they get to wear business casual clothes. Others work at summer camps herding elementary school students around all day. Others scoop ice cream at the Union, sticky up to their elbows. All the options are different, each with their own pros and cons, but it can sometimes seem as though everyone has a plan at this point. If, like me, you don’t have anything lined up yet, it can feel like there’s a countdown looming in the back of your mind, ticking off the remaining days until you’re out of school but still unemployed. So here’s how I’m approaching the application and interview process.

1. Start with internships that sound like they’re the right path to landing your dream job. Go big or go home, right?
2. Draft a resume. Google how to make your part-time retail gig sound like it has given you the skills necessary for those internships and not just a supreme distrust of every middle aged woman with the canispeaktothemanager haircut. Ever give a grubby kid the stink eye for trying to smuggle a Snickers out of the store? Loss prevention! Can you rattle off the only mildly scammy spiel about store charge cards in your sleep? You’ve converted shoppers into loyalty members! Sales!
3. Don’t hear back from the internships.
4. Go to an awkward networking event put on by your college. Google ‘good small talk ideas’ for when the conversation inevitably lulls. Hide in the corner where you feel safe and can drown your sorrows in appetizers until it’s socially acceptable to duck out.
5. Apply for an internship in your hometown that you’re less interested in but more confident in your ability to get. Nail the interview. Get excited about it! Learn in that last ten minutes of the interview that the position is unpaid.
6. *Cry in poor*
7. Wonder if maybe you need to start posting cheesy motivational stories on LinkedIn that have about a 2% chance of having actually occurred. Snap out of it and close the tab. Love yourself.
8. Start applying to restaurants.
9. Don’t get frustrated when restaurants that will hire anyone who can breathe reject your application because they don’t want to hire servers for just the summer.
10. Start to reconsider the unpaid internship possibility. How much is your labor really worth anyways?
11. Too much.
12. Creep on people you went to high school with on LinkedIn. Feel comforted by the fact that at least your LinkedIn bio makes you sound half-literate.
13. Hear back from that dream internship. Or get a call from your favorite restaurant back home that you applied to forever ago but that lost your application for a while. Or nanny for the family next door with the absolutely demonic children who are balanced out by their parents’ very deep pockets.
14. Relax. Tell everyone who will listen that you actually have plans for the summer. Bask in the satisfaction of knowing that you and your bank account are going to be fine. Start planning what you’re going to say or do or wear on your first day.

But first, survive finals.