In the current economic climate, it seems almost impossible to get an internship. If you’re a first year student wishing to get a head start gaining work experience, you can almost certainly forget it.

Our frustrations are obvious and simple. A successful candidate is often one with ‘work experience’, which just happens to be what we aim of getting out of an internship.  It’s a catch 22 that I seem to be coming across more and more as I search the web for placements: employers increasingly expect a boasting work-experience-filled CV when you’ve barely even started writing one.

With the few internships that are available for first years, or even second year students at university, we’ve got very little flexibility, and fierce competition. So apart from applying at least 6 months before the placement for a chance of getting even an interview, what can we do to be more competitive?

Perhaps we’re all expected to start work placements in high school to boast our then non-existent CVs, a process which I’m well aware is already underway.

For those who draw the line at internships being for university, there seems to be little mercy. As First Years, we are refused the internship opportunities given to graduates, and we’re almost expected to sit back for two years until our usually-completely-unrelated-degrees open up the doors to those jobs.

Melisa Pusun states on her Milkround post on internships that one has to ‘adapt to a rapidly changing environment’. I couldn’t agree more, and suggest that if you’re aiming to get those few internships available to first year students, you do exactly that.

The workplace environment now seems to be one heavily influenced by networking, and this I believe is the way forward for us youngsters.  It’s obvious that it can’t hurt to know the right people that can get you the job. Knowing at least someone from the inside that can put in a good word for you can do wonders.

To know these exact people however is expecting a lot, but more often than not it’s a simple case of communicating with people around you and just letting people out there know what you’re looking for that will make the difference. Rather than spending countless hours writing and perfecting letters of motivation and CVs, it might be better investing some of your efforts in networking.

Meeting new people and socialising can do little harm (except the occasional hang-over), and might just be the better method of connecting with people in your field. Be passionate and motivated about your interests and people might just be willing to help. By word of mouth you may just find people that are in a better position to help you then you are yourself.

If networking is simply a way of life in the workplace, then we students should start taking advantage of it too. It’s effective and often bypasses administrative procedures that are only more unnecessary obstructions that separate us from our internships.