How to Get an Internship That Is Actually Worth Doing

Most advice about internships assumes a world where you apply through a portal, get placed at a firm with a structured programme, and emerge with a reference and a story.

That world exists. It is not the one most students in the region are applying into, where the number of formal internships is far smaller than the number of students who want one, and where a great many placements consist of sitting in a corner photocopying for six weeks.

So this is about two things: how to get one at all, and how to make sure it is worth the term you spent chasing it.

What an internship is actually for

Not the certificate. Almost nobody reads it.

An internship does three things that a classroom cannot. It tells you whether you want the work, which is information you cannot get any other way and which occasionally saves people four years. It gives you a small number of concrete things you did, which is what an interviewer can actually ask about. And it puts you in a room with people who do the job, one or two of whom may remember you when something opens.

Everything below follows from those three. A placement that delivers none of them is not an internship; it is unpaid attendance.

Where they actually come from

The formal route — advertised programmes at the big banks, telcos, the mining and energy firms, the large NGOs — is real, competitive and worth applying to. Deadlines fall early, often two terms before the placement, and are missed by most people who intended to apply.

But the majority of placements students actually get do not come from an advert. They come from asking.

People your family already knows. Uncomfortable to use and entirely normal. Everybody who has a route in got it from somewhere; the ones who pretend otherwise are usually the ones who had the most help.

Your department and lecturers. They are asked for names surprisingly often, and they suggest the students who came to office hours. That is a low bar and most people never clear it.

Small organisations directly. A firm of six people has no programme and no HR department, which means no queue. It also means the work is real — at a small organisation you will be given actual responsibility because there is nobody else to give it to. These are frequently the better placements.

Alumni of your school or programme. People are markedly more willing to reply to somebody from their own school. It is not logical and it is reliable.

If you are still working out which fields to aim at, do that first — the range of jobs that exist is much wider than the list most students are choosing from, and it is a waste to spend your one summer inside a profession you picked by default.

How to ask so that somebody says yes

The message that gets ignored is the one that asks for a lot and offers nothing specific. *Dear Sir/Madam, I am a student seeking an internship in your esteemed organisation, kindly consider my application.*

The one that works is short, specific and easy to say yes to.

Name the person. Say what you are studying and where. Say one true, particular thing about what they do — something that shows you looked at more than the homepage. Say exactly what you are asking for, and make it small: two weeks, four weeks, unpaid if you can afford it, starting when. Say what you can do that is useful. Attach one page.

The reason to make it small is that a large request needs a decision and a small one needs only a shrug. And once you are inside for two weeks and useful, the two weeks routinely become six.

Send it to a named human, not to info@. Follow up once, politely, after ten days. Then leave it — and send fifteen of these rather than three, because the response rate is low for everybody and it is not personal.

Making a bad placement into a good one

Plenty of placements start out as photocopying. What separates the students who get something from it is what they do in the first week.

Ask for the outcome, early. In week one, ask your supervisor: what would make this useful to you by the end? Most supervisors have never been asked and have not thought about it, and the question converts you from an obligation into a person with a task.

Find the unglamorous problem nobody has time for. Every organisation has one — a spreadsheet nobody has tidied, a process nobody has written down, a backlog. Doing that well is how interns become memorable, and it is a genuine contribution rather than a favour.

Write down what you did, weekly. Specific and quantified where possible. *Reconciled 400 records and found 30 duplicates* is an interview answer. *Assisted the finance department* is not. Do it as it happens; you will not remember in December.

Ask people what they do and how they got there. You have temporary, unusual permission to ask anyone in the building about their career. Almost no intern uses it. Fifteen minutes with somebody two levels up is worth more than a week of the actual tasks.

The one page you attach

Most student CVs fail for the same reason: they describe a person who has not done anything yet, at length.

You almost certainly have more material than you think. Any job you have held, including one in a family business. Anything you organised — an event, a team, a church group, a class project where you did the coordinating. Any position of responsibility at school. Anything technical you taught yourself. Any course you finished. Volunteering.

Write each one as what you did and what resulted, not as a title. *Ran the accounts for a school event with a budget of 4,000 cedis* beats *Treasurer, Cultural Committee* by a wide margin, because the first tells somebody what you are like to work with.

Then keep it to a single page, put your contact details where they can be found, name the file with your own name rather than `CV final final 2`, and send it as a PDF so it does not rearrange itself on somebody else's computer. Have one person who is not your friend read it before you send it anywhere.

Tailor the top three lines to each organisation. Not the whole document — just enough that the first thing they read is relevant to them. That takes four minutes and does most of the work of standing out, because almost nobody does it.

The unpaid question, honestly

Much internship advice waves this away. It should not be.

Unpaid work is a real cost and it filters by family income rather than by ability — the students who can afford a free summer are frequently not the ones who most need the opportunity. The International Labour Organization's work on youth employment treats this as a structural problem, not a personal one, and it is worth knowing that if you cannot take an unpaid placement, that is a constraint, not a failure of ambition.

If money makes it impossible, the alternatives are genuinely good. A paid job of any kind builds the same transferable evidence — reliability, dealing with people, handling money, working under pressure. Volunteering a few hours a week during term costs less than a whole summer. A well-executed personal project you can show is worth more than a placement you sat through quietly, and nobody has to sponsor it.

Afterwards, do the two things everybody skips

Within a week of finishing, write to everybody who helped you and thank them specifically. One sentence about a thing they taught you. This takes ten minutes and puts you in a small category.

Then keep the contact alive — a short message twice a year, when you finish something or when you see something relevant to them. Not asking for anything. This is the whole mechanism by which a summer placement turns into a job offer three years later, and it fails almost entirely because people feel awkward about the first message.

If you are unsure how to handle any of it — what to ask for, how to follow up, whether a placement is going wrong — that is precisely the sort of narrow, practical question a mentor is useful for, and a much better use of one than asking what you should do with your life.

The point

An internship is not a credential to collect. It is a cheap experiment in a possible future, run before the cost of being wrong gets high.

Treated that way, even a placement you hated has done its job — you now know something about yourself that would otherwise have taken years and a much more expensive change of direction to find out.