Lucy Rice works 20 hours a week at an unpaid internship, writing and editing stories for a weekly hyperlocal newspaper in New York City. She plans to finish graduate school and then look for work that would eventually allow her to produce longer, explanatory journalism.
A friend told her about Straus News, where she is one of 10 interns. She took the position because she needed experience. So far, among other assignments, she has covered an election night watch party as a wave of New York candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won primaries, and has reported on a Spanish-language group chat that Mr. Mamdani just started to engage community members.
“The first month and a half of summer, I wasn’t doing anything journalism related,” Ms. Rice says. “I was working random jobs to save money so that I could afford to do this internship.”
Why We Wrote This
Employers are contracting more interns even as concerns grow that artificial intelligence will eliminate many of the entry-level jobs new workers would typically get. Experts say an internship is a chance to show the soft skills that might not be apparent on a résumé.
“I want to be a bit more intentional about the stories that I’m working on for the last month,” Ms. Rice says. She knows she’s not getting an offer when she’s done. The Manhattan newsroom of Straus News, where she works, only has one editor and one full-time reporter.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 4 million U.S. college students complete internships during the school year or over the summer. NACE says that employers report wanting to hire 4% more interns in 2026, which follows a sharp decline the previous year.
For students like Ms. Rice and recent graduates, internships offer experience, exposure, and networking opportunities, but the potential to convert them to full-time jobs varies widely by industry. Still, experts say there are some steps to get the most out of the experience.
Michele Moyer is the director of Career Development and Community Engagement at Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She thinks there is a science to the timing of inquiring about full-time work while still interning, and a mindset that students or recent graduates must have when they go into the experience.
“Employers are getting workers, but they’re also auditioning employees,” Ms. Moyer cautions students to remember. “With the cost of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding an employee, it’s a great way for them to learn a lot about a student before they have to make a commitment.”
Ms. Moyer preaches professionalism, being a self-starter, and punctuality to her students. Showing hard skills is important, but soft skills are too, she says.
“We’re trying to make sure that students really understand that and know how to grow these competencies, and to show employers that, ‘Hey, I’m a really good team player and here’s how I can show you that.’”
Raiyan Islam is an international student from Bangladesh going into his senior year at Denison University, a small school near Columbus, Ohio. After being turned down for a research internship last summer, he applied again and was accepted. It came with a $4,500 stipend and housing to work on a numerical linear algebra research project at Ohio State University.
“It was a relief to get the internship,” Mr. Islam says. “I knew that I’d have a job, and that I could do some research this summer, so it wasn’t going to be a waste of time.”
Five other potential employers rejected him before this internship came through. Some of the work he wanted to do, he couldn’t, because he is not a U.S. citizen. He isn’t looking to be hired full-time because he has to finish school. After that, he wants to start graduate school and eventually get his Ph.D.
“It is harder these days to get any kind of job … and it’s only going to get more difficult in five or six years, probably, when I graduate from grad school and I’m looking for jobs,” says Mr. Islam, who says he wants to be a college professor one day.
Andrea St. James, executive director for career education at Western New England University, says leveraging networks is smart. With AI threatening to eliminate some entry-level jobs that recent graduates would typically get, being proactive is akin to being entrepreneurial.
“I take the philosophy that, with your career, you study a specific discipline but, in addition to that, you’re an entrepreneur. You have to be an entrepreneur with your life,” she says.
That means looking at things from different angles and seeing where else your skill set works.
“If you’re an accounting major, and AI takes over some of those entry-level jobs, you know what, there are a lot of other companies that have a finance component to it,” she says.
Ms. St. James says that’s a better way of being strategic, of considering what your skills bring to the table, and how you can use them.
“It can be scary. It can be overwhelming. It can be frustrating, but how can we look at things [in] a different way so we can maintain that momentum?”