Listen to Stacia talk about the summer internship process for Masters students in STEM fields. Transcript: Stephanie: Hi there. You're listening to Gear Up season two, where we bring you the Duke Career Center's own career advisers to talk about a variety a summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie and today, we're talking to Stacia, who advises graduate students in various science areas. Stacia: I am Stacia Solomon and I am one of the graduate student advisors here in the Career Center. I have a few areas of outreach that I specifically oversee, and those include social sciences, engineering and physical sciences, and computational in quantitative areas. Stephanie: So kind of generally speaking, across all those areas, how early would you say that graduate students that you work with should really start looking for summer internships? Stacia: So my initial answer to that is it really depends on the area. There are some programs that we have here at Duke which require their students to have an internship. Those are Masters students in particular during their first summer following their first academic year. So for those students and particularly those are students in the mid areas, in some of the stat students as well, they need to start looking around, you know, in the fall for the next summer. So it's a pretty, you know, really quick turnaround for those students in a lot of those opportunities are taken away pretty quickly. But for other areas, it really just depends on the discipline and the rhythm. Some of them follow more of the professional year and pattern in terms of internships, like there may be more internships opportunities around a certain conference or things that may happen at different other pivotal times during the year. So it really, really depends on the discipline. But I would definitely say, you know, by February, March, pretty much true for all disciplines, you should have your internship site set or be narrowing down what your final selections are. Stephanie: And so in terms of kind of finding those opportunities or knowing where to look for them, what kind of resources do you usually recommend to students for identifying those. Stacia: Yeah. So a lot of the research that we use is typically the same as, you know, identifying that final job. So we use a lot of the bigger or we refer a lot of the bigger job posting areas such as LinkedIn and umm Indeed, The Muse is also one of the job boards just for it in general that we would refer to students. And there may be some more specific ones depending on the discipline in the industry that might get more specific for some of those areas. But we definitely encourage students to have their online presence in tact. In this day and age, that's something that's really, really critical and really important for students. And we also encourage them to personalize their documents as much as well to help them to stand out for those different internship opportunities. Stephanie: So, I mean, this is a very broad question for so much of the different industries that you work with specifically. But in terms of kind of like skills or qualities that students who are going into these industries should be trying to showcase when they're beginning the interview process, you know what kind of advice do you usually give to students or what should they expect to be asked about, in the interview process? Stacia: Yes, so hard skills are really big deal, especially for some of the more technical areas, like really knowing those programing languages and different statistical software packages and all of those hard skills are methods of how to research a certain thing are is really, really critical. And I think a lot of the students know that. And as Duke students, they're getting that. That's just comes with the Duke package. But some of the things that the students may not really think about that they really need is those interpersonal skills that I think in