I suppose many international students, like me, face the same anxiety of finding the internship. As a Chinese student, I faced many challenges in terms of language, environment and workplace culture. Especially in a country like the Netherlands, where many of the seemingly perfect positions are only available to students who are fluent in Dutch, this is obviously a disadvantage for students from international backgrounds. So how can we use our international strengths to our advantage in order to find a suitable internship? I hope my story is able to draw some inspiration for your path towards a successful internship.
Initially, when I realized that I needed to find an internship, I aimlessly searched various job boards for internships within a variety of industries, including retail, FMCG, consulting and more. I wrote a cover letter that could be applied to all kinds of positions and applied to almost every job that I thought I could meet the basic requirements for. However, this strategy didn’t seem to work and I didn’t receive any further interviews with any companies for almost a month.
Having discovered this, I began to take a closer look at my strengths, my past experience and my interests. I used to work part-time in modeling and fashion related jobs and had some insight into the fashion industry. In addition, since the beginning of 2021, I’ve established my own Little Red Book account, a popular social media platform in China, acquired around 3,000 followers. As a Chinese influencer, I have developed a strong research interest in the social media platforms in the market context. In the process, I have also gained a deeper awareness of how influencers function and a more nuanced understanding of how to read market efforts from an Asian perspective.
In this case, I was focused on looking for an internship focusing on social media marketing, preferably related to the Chinese market and fashion industry, which I know well. I was lucky enough to find an influencer marketing intern for the fashion brand CLUSE, a position that required the intern to be involved in the planning and execution of product marketing for both the European and Chinese markets, as well as finding suitable influencers on social media platforms to promote the products. Therefore, I wrote an exclusive cover letter for the position and carefully revised my CV to highlight my strengths. Later on, I received an invitation to an offline interview and was successful in getting an offer.
Now I have finished my internship. When looking back on the whole internship, it really allowed me to comprehend the whole marketing sector in a global context from both practitioner and business perspectives, which piqued my ability to work in the marketing industry. It has also enabled me to approach my future communication studies on social media from a structuralist perspective.
My experience has demonstrated the importance for international students of finding an internship that fits your profile. The initial step in the process of finding an internship is to understand your interests and maximize your unique international strengths, which will help you filter out unsuitable internships, earn you more time and energy to personalize your application, and enhance your professional skills and knowledge during the internship, even helping you to clarify your future career path!
I hope my job search experience can give you some inspiration and I wish for good luck with your internship finding!
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