Just finished first year! Advice for 2014ers

zephyra
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:27:06 +0000

It’s not that you HAVE to do everything winter quarter–lots of people don’t start searching until the last minute and it turns out fine–but it makes life so much easier if you know what you’re going to do early on. And there are always people who start searching too late and don’t get anything.

The other thing is that many internships have deadlines as early as February or March. So you don’t want to find out about something until after the deadline has already passed. And think of all the stuff you have to do in order to apply: write essays and fill out applications, produce letters of recommendation (if necessary), set up interviews (by phone or in-person), all on top of classes. Personally I would use winter break to make a list of all the things you want to apply to, and start filling out applications then. Then you’ll be busy with finals, and then during early spring quarter you can start submitting/interviewing. Also, have a back-up plan, even if it’s just working your high school retail job. Sometimes things do fall through, through no fault of your own.

If you’re a science major looking for a lab job (especially a paid one), you have to realize that the lab positions at UChicago fill up relatively quickly. This is especially bad if you’re a first year with relatively little experience. Also, professors at other schools are a lot less likely to respond to your emails. Typically, UChicago professors will respond to your emails, but my friends and I have had something like a 30% response rate from professors at other institutions, with <10% of those actually being a positive “yes, you can work in the lab.”

One exception is that if you’ve done very well in a class or you’ve been working for a lab during the school year, a professor might offer to pay you to stay with them for the summer. Other exceptions are kids who have done tons of research already or have connections to academia.

Certain advisors, by the way, are awful and will tell you that you don’t need to worry about the first summer. The problem is that when you start applying for internships the second summer everyone else will have the cool internship they did the first summer on their resume and you will have…nothing.