The Best Summer Internship For College Students: Working For Nobody

The best gigs don’t come from job fairs. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

The title of this piece isn’t entirely accurate. The best summer internship isn’t the one in the employ of nobody, but in the employ of the student herself.

For students, there are five ways to attack the summer:

1. Summer school – keep earning those hours, get out of school in 3.5 years, limit debt

2. Traditional internship, big company

3. Internship at a startup, or very small company

4. Random job in retail, or at a summer camp, beach, pool, etc.

5. Start your own startup- Working 12-14 hours a day for three months.

Most students spend their college summers—including the one leading into their freshman year—fulfilling the duties involved in one of these first four options.

Most students, however, would be well served by taking one of their summers and dedicating it to their own project, a startup that germinated in their head, reared to life by their own hands and, in some rare cases, sustained as a real business going forward.

It should be acknowledged that not every student can do this. The summer months offer that one break when students can bring in a significant amount of cash to help them get through the school year. Some people depend on the earnings from the summer, and can’t put those earnings at risk by trying to build a startup that may never turn a single dollar of revenue.

For those who can do this, however, the rewards can be rich.

The benefits of spending a summer on a startup are broken out in greater depth in a piece at FundersClub.

Students shouldn’t underplay the value of working on something of their own for a summer, not only for the test of experience and learning it offers, but also for the resume building aspect. As somebody who has hired more than a dozen people, I view this kind of experience as the most valuable sort.

If a student can start a summer with close to nothing and produce a significant application, or any kind of business, that’s found traction or a unique way of solving a problem, it’s a sign of several things:

The student is self-motivated
Has superior focus
Possesses a knack for finishing off and completing projects
Has the versatility to handle nearly anything involved in a job

As an employer, these are some of the most valuable things that any employee can have, whether they’re writing code as an engineer, laying out operations as project manager or working to get a company more leads and close more sales.