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Today’s Ypulse Interview is with Lauren Berger, founder and namesake of   Intern Queen. I caught up with Lauren over the phone to hear how she earned the title and what current college students and recent grads need to know before starting a job or internship hunt in 2010.

Ypulse: What inspired you to start The Intern Queen?

Lauren Berger: I graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2006, and when I was looking back at what I had accomplished over my four years in college, I started tallying up these internships. Some of them were for credit, most of them were just for experience, but I had had 15 internships total. So I looked at my friends who had had no internships, and I didn’t understand what the disconnect was. Why was I able to find these internships and my close friends and peers weren’t? I came to the conclusion that it was because no one put these opportunities in front of them, no one helped them get from point A to point B. So I thought, “What if I started an internship company where I could help students directly apply for internships and not send them all over the internet to find that perfect internship?” Instead they could go to one site and apply via that site to a ton of cool, different opportunities. And that’s how the Intern Queen idea was born.

YP: What advice would you give to current college students and recent grads worried about finding a job with the economy today?

LB: If anything, it’s just made the message that much more important. Everybody wants to land that job, especially today. The job market is more competitive than ever, and that’s just made internships more competitive than ever before. So just as I would have said to people five years ago, “You need to get focused early,” it’s just that much more important to get focused and get started early.

I think over the next five years, we’re going to see a trend in general where more and more high school students are interning. Currently high schools across the country are creating internship programs allowing high schoolers to intern and get AP or college credit for the internship. I think we’re just going to see more and more of that and students starting to think about internships as early as middle school even.

YP: And how do you feel about that earlier career-minded thinking?

LB: I think if students can start focusing on their careers in general a little bit more in high school, maybe by their junior year of high school, that would be great. A young person today is constantly asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and you come up with all these answers. I think if we as a society can take that one step further and ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up, and what can you do today to try to get there?” I think that would be interesting. Maybe that just starts with students educating themselves by reading magazines about their industry, finding news articles online, visiting websites that have to do with a certain industry. Just generally educating themselves at an earlier age will get these students further in their career…

YP: What are some of the common missteps made by prospective interns?

LB: The biggest mistake I see on my site is that students apply to one internship, and it’s Seventeen magazine or it’s at Universal Music Group. These are companies with huge internship programs that get hundreds of resumes sent each day from myself, hundreds of resumes from other resources, get hundreds of employee referrals each day, etc., and the odds of any student getting these internships, whether you know someone or you don’t, are very slim. What I encourage students to do, and what I’m spending a lot of my day to day on, is constantly engaging and reengaging the users of my site and convincing them to apply for more than one internship. I would say apply for between 10 and 20 internships for summer and the bigger the brand, the bigger the company name, the more companies they should be applying for. All of those big well-known companies have really competitive programs, especially in 2010.

YP: Aside from your site, what resources out there you would point college students towards to help them land the internship they want?

LB: As far as internship listings, I would be lying if I said I found any resources that I think are amazing, but CollegeRecruiter.com is a good one, Uloop,com is not only job and internship listings, but also serves as a bulletin board for college students. I’m a big fan of Indeed.com and Juju.com when it comes to just the internship or the job search, they just aggregate a ton of great job sites together and they do a really nice job getting a good variety of opportunities and a lot of localized opportunities that you won’t find on sites like mine. My site specializes in big metropolitan cities so you’ll see a ton of New York and LA opportunities, but when it comes to Madison, Wisconsin you’re not going to find too much.

I also work with the Washington Post and their Campus Overload section, and they do a great job of having up to date news information on college kids in general.

YP: What about the first stop for a college student looking for an internship or even an industry to explore?

LB: I think the first place any college student should be going is to their career center. It’s the most underused resource at college, and there’s no reason why every student doesn’t have an appointment set with a representative from their career center. You wouldn’t believe the number of students I speak to who have never set foot in their career center. And it’s not enough just to go once. This should be a place they’re constantly visiting. The best local resources for internships or jobs are going to be found at your career center. The career center representatives are working everyday to build and enhance relationships with great companies. That’s really where students should be going first, and that’s where they should be going with their resources. When they graduate, they’d have to pay someone to help with their resumes, right now they can get that help for free.

YP: Are there any companies who work particularly well with Gen Y’ers? Could you name one or two and why?

LB: Sirius XM Radio has great opportunities in New York and Washington D.C. for students, and they let their interns do all kinds of cool podcasts. They’re just very aware of their interns. You can tell they put a lot of effort into it. Ernst & Young is obviously a bigger company, and they’re doing amazing things with their interns as well. The have a great social media strategy when it comes to recruiting interns. Again, very aware of their interns and their needs. And they have very high conversion rates when it comes to offering over 85% of their interns full-time jobs, and out of those people, a very large percentage accept the jobs. Price Waterhouse has a great internship retreat that they do where they fill their interns with so much great information. They allocate a lot of time and resources to their internship programs. And there’s a lot of startups that are really interesting places for students to intern at… There’s a ton of great companies out there doing great things for their interns.

YP: Any last message for Ypulse readers and brands looking to recruit Gen Y?

LB: If you’re an employer and you don’t have an internship program, it’s something you should be considering without a doubt. It can help grow your business and make it run more efficiently, but also provide a really beneficial experience to a student. An internship is essentially a learning experience and an intern should be treated as a trainee. Again, I think a lot of companies could get a lot of value and give a lot of value by creating internship programs.

And with internships as a whole increasing by 4% last year, I think we’re going to see a ton more opportunities coming for this summer and coming for next summer, and also more and more interns starting to intern and starting to intern early. NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, put out a stat that over 70% of college students have an internship on their resume so it’s a ton of students, and it’s really important.

For more campus coverage, visit the Ypulse Collegians Channel, sponsored by Campus Media Group.

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Categorized under: Collegians

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