Can AU Help Me Get An Internship? -Kathleen

Many prospective students are curious to know whether studying at American University can improve their odds of landing a resume-boosting internship; it can. This only happens by capitalizing on the wealth of career resources that are available to AU students, and there is no automatic guarantee that flashing AU on a resume will suffice to secure a competitive position in the nation’s capital. What does secure an internship is information, and AU grants its students access to the most current databases through email subscriptions in order to enable them to be among the first to discover and apply for newly created internship positions in the D.C. area.

In my own experience, I learned of the FBI’s Volunteer Internship Program through the SIS Listserv and was able to round up the materials needed in time to submit an application for it. In this particular case, the position I was applying for had been reserved exclusively for AU’s School of International Service graduate students, which was helpful because that whittled away a fair share of the D.C. competitors that would otherwise have flooded the application process. One month later, I received a call from an FBI agent requesting an interview with me, and during my subsequent interview with him I answered several of his questions with references back to experiences from my first semester at AU. Two weeks after that, I got called back for a second interview, and although I have yet to officially sign a contract, I’m told that I'm very likely to receive an offer from the FBI in the near future.

I would never have known to apply if I hadn’t read about the opportunity through a listserv email. Ideally, I would constantly be on the lookout for job and internship openings by searching the websites of various government agencies, but the luxury of online browsing is limited for me since my time is more often consumed by the heavy workload that comes with pursuing a M.A. So, the convenience of having had the information about that internship come to me—instead of having to go scout it out myself—was invaluable. This is just one example of the ways in which AU’s resources provide students with advantages that inevitably enhance their chances of getting a head start on their careers while going to school full-time.