What do employers look for in an intern?
Internship interviewers know you have limited work experience. They are looking for curiosity, follow-through, and how you work with other people. Your best material comes from classes, group projects, clubs, part-time jobs and volunteering. If you are still applying, our internship cover letter examples can help you get to this stage.
Tell me about yourself
Keep it under a minute: what you study, one relevant experience, and why this internship is the next step. Our guide to answering tell me about yourself has more structures to try.
I'm a junior studying accounting. Last year I started tutoring students in intro finance through the campus learning center, and I've enjoyed seeing how much clearer numbers get when you explain them step by step. I'm interested in audit, so this internship with your assurance team is exactly the kind of work I want to try.
Why do you want this internship?
Name something specific about the team or company and connect it to what you have studied. Avoid answers that would fit any internship.
In my operations management course, we built a model to cut delivery times for a mock distributor, and it was the project I enjoyed most all year. Fabrikam's logistics analytics team does that kind of work at a real scale, and I'd like to learn how those models hold up with real data and real deadlines.
Tell me about a class project you're proud of
Focus on your part, the result and what you learned. Use "I" for your own work, even in a group project.
For a marketing class, our team of four created a social media plan for a local bakery. I ran the customer survey, which got 85 responses, and turned the results into the three post themes we pitched. The owner used two of them. If I did it again, I'd start the survey a week earlier so we had more time to test ideas.
Describe a conflict in a group project
Show that you address problems directly and respectfully before going to a professor. The STAR method helps you keep the story short.
In a statistics project, one teammate missed two meetings and hadn't started his section. I messaged him privately to ask what was going on, and he said he'd been picking up extra shifts at work. We agreed he'd take the data cleaning, which he could do on his own schedule, and set a check-in two days before the deadline. He finished on time, and we earned an A.
How will you balance this internship with your classes?
Show a system and a habit of flagging conflicts early.
I keep my week in a shared calendar with classes, study blocks and work hours, and I add exam dates as soon as I get each syllabus. I already know my midterms fall in the first week of March, so I can share my availability for that week now. If anything changes, I'd raise it as early as possible rather than the day before.
How do you learn a new tool or skill quickly?
Give a real example of learning something on your own, then asking good questions.
When my research lab switched to a new survey platform, I went through the tutorials over a weekend and rebuilt one of our old surveys as practice. I wrote down three questions I couldn't answer and asked our lab manager at our Monday meeting. By the end of that week, other students were coming to me with their questions.
What questions do you have for us?
Always have two or three ready, and make at least one about the work itself. See our list of questions to ask at the end of an interview for more ideas.
What does a typical week look like for an intern on this team? And thinking about past interns who did really well here, what did they do that stood out to you?