If you've ever tried to pursue an internship with a legitimate company, it's likely you've experienced difficulty in doing so because of your lack of resources. Fortunately, the following is a list of 6 steps that you can take in order to obtain an internship that isn't necessarily affiliated with your university, but rather with a legitimate company. Simply keep reading to learn more!

1. Build up your current resume.

Competitive internships are difficult to obtain for many reasons and one of which has to do with the level of professional expertise of the applicants who apply for them. In other words, you can't expect to obtain a competitive internship if you only have 2-3 professional experiences listed on your resume.

Of course, whether those experiences will appeal to the employer in a positive light certainly depends on the skills you obtained as a result of your involvement with them. So, when considering what activities you should include on your resume, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What responsibilities did I have as a result of my involvement with this activity?

And

2. What skills did I gain as a result of completing those responsibilities?

If you are able to formulate a list of 4-5 specific answers to each of these questions, it is likely that the experience you're contemplating listing on your resume is of significant value to you (and will be perceived as being equally significant to the employer you are applying to work for).

On the other hand, here are some signs that the experience you are contemplating listing on your resume may NOT be the best one to include:

-You only had 1-2 basic responsibilities to fulfill during your involvement with the activity.

-You didn't gain any new skills which could be applied to a professional career in order to make a significant difference in the world.

Or

-You have a gut feeling that an employer would most likely skim over the activity in search of a more significant one.

2. Perfect your cover letter.

Your cover letter is your means of advertising yourself to potential employers in an attempt to make them feel more than eager to schedule an interview with you. Sure, having lots of professional experience is great. However, you're going to need to create something to supplement those experiences in order to give employers a sense of who you are on a more personal level.

While you can certainly choose to include the experiences listed on your resume in your cover letter, your job is to do more than just that by expanding on the specific skills that you gained from those experiences so that employers will understand what you would bring to their company if you were offered a job with them.

If you are still unclear on how to do this, here are some examples:

"I am excellent at relationship building, memorizing, multi-tasking, maintaining a genuine sense of positivity, anticipating things before they happen, and possess numerous interpersonal skills"

Or

"I have an immense amount of passion and skill for writing, public speaking, and establishing genuine and productive relationships with others."

3. Make a professional account on Handshake.

Not only are competitive internships hard to obtain, they are also very difficult to find! Before creating my own Handshake account, I used to conduct numerous internship searches with Google and almost always felt disappointed with the conclusion of each one.

Fortunately, Handshake allows you to create your very own professional profile and apply for dozens upon dozens of internship opportunities that pertain to your interests!

Simply click on the link to get started (and trust me, you'll be surprised with just how many available internship opportunities there are):

https://app.joinhandshake.com/login

4. Become good friends with your professors.

Did I surprise you with this one? Well, guess what, so will your professors after they inform you of all of the professional internship opportunities you didn't know about before getting to know them on a more personal level.

Better yet, they may even offer you an internship just because they already know they would enjoy working with you.

So, go visit them during their office hours with legitimate questions about your coursework, ask questions in class, etc.

Basically, you'll want to become such good friends with your professors that they'll literally offer you an internship with them just because you've expressed curiosity in trying to find one.

5. Apply for the internship as soon as you hear about it.

If it isn't already obvious, another factor that makes an internship so competitive is the fact that EVERYONE wants it for themselves.

This is why, as soon as you hear about an internship, you need to apply for it.

In the meantime, make sure to finish perfecting the application materials we've already discussed.

This way, as soon as you hear about the internship, you'll be ready to go after it!

6. Do not give up.

People like you who genuinely want something to happen never give up on making their dreams a reality. They keep going!

Even if the internship you're currently pursuing doesn't work out, you need to remind yourself that it didn't work out for a reason.

And that reason is likely because it just wasn't meant for you.

Your dream internship may take some time to find, but I promise you, you will find it!

Just keep searching and applying, that's all.