Kicking off with our first episode of Season 2, featuring Career Center Assistant Director Catherine Allen.

Stephanie: Hi there. You're listening to gear up Season 2, where we bring you the Duke Career Centers on career advisers to talk about a variety, of summer internship experiences. My name is Stephanie and today we're talking to Catherine, who advises computer science, jobs at the career center.

Catherin: Sure. My name's Catherine Allen. I'm an assistant director here at the Duke Career Center, where I primarily focus on computer science students at the moment. That is sort of my area of choice. But also I will meet with any student. So there's no umm there's no guidelines that I only have to meet with computer science students. If that makes sense.

Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess for this, we'll focus mainly on computer science students. But if you have like other examples of students you've met with, then feel free to definitely add those in. So for computer science students I know there's like a wide range of internships, within that hat students are usually interested in. But generally speaking, how early would you say that your students start looking for summer opportunities?

Catherine: Sure. if you want to work in a big with a big five tech company? Say, you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, you're going to want to start looking for internships early fall. And that really means you've got to have your personal materials ready by over the summer.

Stephanie: And that's true for every year. Like yeah.

Catherine: Oh, yeah

Stephanie: You know sophomores.

Catherine: Mostly because fall is the biggest recruiting season for larger tech companies. And if they get all their positions filled in the fall, they won't be back in the spring. And more, more and more years, we see them getting what they need in the fall. So you really have to be prepared to hit the ground running in August. With that said, though, there's plenty of students who have no interest in working with the a big five tech company and that landscape changes things a little bit. Fall is still a popular time, but you have more flexibility and you'll see more opportunities throughout the academic year. So if you're ending December and you haven't gotten any offers or you haven't seen the opportunity coming across it that like you really want, don't panic! Because there's going to be a ton of opportunities available for you again in the spring. In fact, you will see opportunities pop up even towards the end of the spring semester. So just be patient and know that it's a process. But if you're really going for a competitive internship, especially if it's your junior junior year fall is is the time.

Stephanie: So during the fall or even I guess at the end of summer, what kind of like resources are available to students for finding internships? Like where should they be looking for those opportunities?

Catherine: So it's going to be multi-faceted and you're going to want to pull in a lot of different resources to help. Really, I always recommend as a first solid stop is our CareerConnections umm platform. Everybody has an account. You just log in with your net ID, but there on the left hand side is going to be a jobs and internships section and there is a lot of different filters you can apply. But you know, start broad to see all the options listed there and then start to narrow down because obviously the more you narrow down, the fewer options you're going to see. But also go ahead and get your your search saved on that platform so that when you're in the throes of the fall semester, you got to do is log in and just see that saved search. You don't have to reapply everything all the time. Once you get familiar with that platform, I also recommend LinkedIn.com slash students. If you if you have a LinkedIn account and you log in and you search jobs there, that's great, too. But I would say start with Linkedin.com slash stud