What To Do This Summer if Your Dream Internship Rejected You

By Tamara Evdokimova on June 15, 2018

Summer has officially started, and you haven’t landed an internship. You’re slowly realizing that you don’t have a backup plan. So, what can you do this summer if your dream internship rejected you?

From an internship rejections veteran, here are seven tips for having a productive summer and boosting your resume in the process:

Source: Pixabay.

1. Take a free online class

Just because you can’t afford to pay $2k per credit (looking at you, Georgetown!) to enroll in your university’s summer classes doesn’t mean you can’t learn a marketable skill. There are a myriad of sites offering courses in everything ranging from architecture to business management. For example, EdX is a cool educational platform that allows you to audit courses for free at your own pace. You can even receive an official completion certificate at the end, but you may need to pay between $50 and $200 for that perk.

For a completely cost-free education, look into coding classes! There are many options out there, but my personal favorite is CodeCamp, which offers over 300 hours of coding practice and helps you learn multiple programming languages, from HTML to JavaScript. In our digital era, some basic coding skills are a must for everyone. And you can use them to build your own website and show off what you did this summer.

2. Start a volunteer organization in your local community

An easy way to fill your time and boost your resume is to volunteer in your community. But why not give yourself a little extra edge and start a volunteering organization of your own? After all, no one understands your community’s needs better than you do. Seek out the help of your family, friends, and maybe even reach out to your high school teachers to find out what needs improving in your hometown. And then enlist some high-schoolers desperate to build up their extracurricular portfolio before applying to colleges, and you’ve got yourself a team! Not only will you develop your organizational and management skills, but you’ll also provide a service to the people you grew up with.

3. Volunteer for a local politician

Another cool way to volunteer is to research a local politician and offer your help on their campaigns. With the midterm elections coming up in November 2018 and many new, outsider candidates looking to enter politics, you’ll have no shortage of options. But wait, you’ll tell me, all the internships on the Hill have already been filled! Well, the easiest way to get in with the political crowd is to start small. After all, in the words of Tipp O’Neill, all politics is local. Seek out someone seeking to fill a Board of Education or a municipal council position. Those candidates will be all too glad to have a young, eager, and most importantly, a technologically savvy college student on their team. You can even reach out to a mayoral candidate and pitch your candidacy. Hey, they don’t have to pay you, and you’ll probably be the only person reaching out to them instead of waiting for a position to be posted. You never know, the mayor of your local town in the Middle of Nowhere, NJ might be eyeing a congressional seat during the next elections season!

Student teaching kids

Source: Pixabay.

4. Teach a course

Volunteering & community service option #3 is teaching. Whether a mere college freshman or a rising senior, you most certainly possess a few skills the school kids in your hometown would love to learn. After all, you’re probably not the only one who doesn’t know what to do this summer.

Speak a second language? Offer free or cheap tutoring to high-schoolers taking that language in school or wanting to learn it from scratch. Always the one in charge of putting the PPT together for group projects? Teach a project presentations course! Play guitar in your spare time? Music lessons it is!

With a long summer ahead of you, you’ll get many hours of teaching experience and maybe even make a few bucks along the way. And remember, the best place to find clients is to ask your mom’s friends.

5. Learn a language

If you don’t like teaching, then you can take up learning a new language yourself. The Duolingo app is a great place to start building your base. From there, you can start watching TV shows and films in the foreign language and eventually reading short books. iTalki is also a useful website to meet other language learners and practice those speaking skills. And nothing sounds more impressive than telling a potential employer that you self-studied a language over the summer. The internship that rejected you will live to regret their loss.

Man blogging

Source: Pixabay

6. Grow your parents’ business

I know working for your parents sounds lame. But if one or both of them own a local business, this solution may be exactly what your resume needs. Help them develop a new marketing campaign or even launch their own website! Put your networking and social media skills to good use to promote their business. Your family will be so grateful that they might even use the additional revenue you bring in to give you a small bonus. But more importantly, you will gain experience working for a real business, which will be invaluable to your profile when you re-apply to that dream internship next year.

7. Start a blog

Last but not least, start a blog! But there are already sooo many blogs out there, so there’s no way you’ll make it, right? Wrong! Firstly, you shouldn’t be starting a blog at all if your only intention to get rich and famous. Find a passion that you love talking about and share it with your readers. Whether it’s baking tiny cupcakes, mountain biking, or critiquing books and movies, there is a community of people out there who share your interests and want to learn more about them.

Alternatively, use the blog as a platform to document a project you’ve decided to complete this summer (perhaps one of the six above?) and inspire hundreds of other college students to make use of their free time as they contemplate what to do this summer after an unsuccessful internship search. As long as you pick a topic that won’t cease to inspire you, you’ll easily be able to produce cool content, and your followers will come to you!

Got any other ideas for spending your summer in a productive way and boosting your resume in the process? Already working on a cool side gig? Comment below and share your ideas and plans!

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