How to Start (Mid-season Update)

Now it's mid-season. Here's where I stand:

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers-flyback to San Francisco next month for the Transaction Services internship. Paid.
  

• Sierra Pacific Resources- OFFER EXTENDED! Paid, free housing, in Vegas

• Smuckers- Shipping/Receiving Manager, final interview this week (via phone). Paid, free housing, Oxnard, CA.

• Kohl's-Buying Office Intern- waiting for results from first interview (held last Thursday), paid, Menomonee Falls, WI.

• KLAS Enterprises- Utah healthcare research firm. I declined after the on-site interview. I wasn't interested in the job after shadowing an employee. Very nice people, though!

• Echostar-Dish Network-Waiting for results of phone interview. Paid, housing provided, Denver, CO.

I said we started en medias res, so here's the beginning:
Despite all the resources available to BYU students, it's still difficult to find an internship for the summer. Here's what I have done:
1. Defined my goals/criteria: I want an internship that will give me a real-world taste of corporate finance. Paid, not in Utah if possible (just to get away for the summer), housing provided would be nice, hopefully the option to go full-time after graduation.
2. Define Resources: I found eRecruiting helpful (byu.erecruiting.com), the Business Career Center, the BYU Career Center (connected with eRecruiting), Vault guides (free on the BYU site), hoovers.com, the BYU career fair, friends, family, the Marriott School Internship database.
3. Figure out how to search. If you have some idea of where you want to live, that'll be most helpful. I didn't, nor do I care right now. So I just used the "shotgun" technique. I uploaded one resume to eRecruiting, and then used it to apply for over 40 positions, any position that only needed a resume. It takes about an hour to do. SOOOOO EASSSSYYY. If one position was particularly interesting, I pasted the e-mail address of the contact in my Gmail and sent them a quick e-mail about how interested I was in the position. From that, I got accepted for about 7 interviews.
4. Dates/Deadlines: You should be searching SERIOUSLY by December. A lot of deadlines pass over Christmas break.
5. What I wish I'd done: won the lottery so I could afford to go to Goldman-Sachs or a big investment firm in NY and schmooze executives for an opportunity to intern. Since I'm poor, and newly married, that's not in the budget. If you don't know someone already, you have a lot of footwork to do to get in with a firm like that, but it's not impossible, just really difficult.
Also, tailor your resume. I wish I'd done that now. I will in the future.
6. Know Someone: Once you narrow down some options, know someone. If you don't know someone in that company yet, find them. Look at the Marriott School's new intern database for a contact that did the internship last year. Look at the alumni directory. Find them, ask questions, show you're interested, then milk them for referrals, I mean, co-workers! They might not be the ones to get you into the company, but they might know someone who can.

I hope this helps other students get a feel for where and how to look for an internship, and also lets them know that they're not walking this path alone.