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## Intro....Why Internships Still Matter [00:00] Hello everyone. We'll get started in just a few moments. Okay, welcome everyone. Today's webinar is about how your student can still land a guaranteed internship this summer. If you haven't already, hopefully you had your summer plans already figured out. Uh whether that's about your academics or your activities and a lot of people tend to ask like should I do uh taking courses or should I do um extracurriculars or should I get an internship or summer program? And the answer is yes to everything. Uh generally speaking, you want to try to bulk up your summer in preparation for college admission season because the colleges really want to understand that are you taking initiative to learn more about your interest, your uh academic pursuits or your career pursuits. So that being said, for today we're going to be covering about how uh students typically apply to internships and you know why they're not the most effective strategies. How are internships created and how to create your own internship. Also at the very end I'll share some resources about what is it that you can do to be able to uh find your own internship and also uh we do have our own internship program for coaching families and so I'll do a small uh quick introduction for that if you want to learn more. Uh quick background for myself. Um I'm coach Victor if you haven't met me already. I used to uh work at UC Berkeley admissions as an outreach coordinator and also graduate in school getting into graduate school instructor. So that being said uh I used to go to different high schools talk all about um how to get into college and also helped a lot of students get into uh undergrad and graduate school um across all different types of uh schools. Uh, also fun fact, I was a full ride UC Berkeley scholar for undergrad and graduate school. So, I didn't have to take a single loan. Uh, so very happy and proud about that. And and if you haven't already, uh, check out my other webinar, uh, regarding um, how I got a full ride scholarship. And lastly, by way of background for my experiences, I work in K through2 education policy, education tech, and now I'm as admission adviser. Uh, so let's get going. And throughout this whole entire time that we're chatting together, please drop your questions in the Q&A box, and I ## Why Traditional Applications Rarely Work [02:30] will definitely uh, be able to answer them. So, uh, first start us off, right, I want to kind of just show a little bit of proof that these are the types of internships that I received in the past while I was in, uh, college, but also this could still apply to high school as well. And so, uh, there is, uh, a high possibility of being able to create your own internship and get paid for it if you know how to do it, the right strategy. For myself, my own way of getting into was not to necessarily apply like what other people do, but it's through the power of networking. And so for today's kind of uh focus, we're going to be um talking about how can you leverage your networks, how can you provide value, how can you provide worth so that way people want your services, they want your help to be able to uh to support their mission. And there are different phases though um into a internship though. So people have to understand that you can't just jump all the way directly to an internship because there are certain things you have to understand fundamentally before you get there because think about it an internship is not necessarily just for a way to learn but it's a way to contribute and de and provide value. So if you are a student right now or you're a parent of a student something think about is how uh far has your student or yourself uh got so far in terms of workbased learning or work-based exposure. The first phase is just shadowing. Being able to just understand how does the job even work. What does it even look like to be in this particular career. The uh the criteria for sha for shadowing is very minimal. All you need to do is learn how to be able to talk and how to network with other people. And the thing about shadowing is that there's no risk to the employer. There doesn't have there's no harm to be able to just talk to somebody um that is not yet in the workforce and to be able to give them information. And so shadowing is one of the easiest opportunities to be able to achieve. Uh this is especially helpful for those who are going to premed maybe uh to consider like shadowing like a like a medical professional at a small clinic. Maybe you have friends or family that are already uh doing this kind of practice. And so you can always reach out and ask to shadow. The second part is uh project based learning. Being able to deliver some type of scope of work where you can apply a little bit of the skills that you learn and the criteria to be able to do this is to just understand what are the specific skills and experiences are they looking for. So when it comes to project based learning it's like a way of being able to uh learn a particular concept apply it to some type of uh value that maybe you can deliver and in ways you could actually do this by yourself as well. You don't necessarily need to deliver it to a company but you could just practice it at home. For example, many people who are into coding or trying to study computer science. I'm sure you all might have spent random nights just coding a particular application up or website just for fun. That's a example of project- based learning. It's where you're taking some type of skill that is required for this particular career and you're just trying out yourself and just the ability to practice that is what sets you up for that internship. The internship once you actually get there is when you're actually able to use the skills that you've developed over time and also using the awareness that you've received from shadowing. So you're combining the two. You're combining the needs of the workplace from that you learn from shadowing to the skills that you've practiced and applied to in the project based learning. And that is what helps you create that internship. So remember that awareness and skills are the two fundamental uh needs that you need to have in order to be ready for that internship. So let's go into how do students typically apply for internships though because uh people need to understand that this uh is what majority of people ## Understanding the Value Equation....Benefits vs. Cost [06:15] tend to do. They will go to LinkedIn or go to some random posting and just try to peruse through a whole list of uh different internships that they can apply to. The challenge with this right is first of all there's a huge list. I mean in this result right here you see 8,586 uh results. It's like, are you really going to look through 8,586 results? No. Uh, and generally speaking, um, students don't really understand what they're looking for. They're blindly looking. So, they might typically type in high school internship, college internship, or whichever, and they're just trying to find the thing that sounds exciting, and it's not being intentional. And just so you know, because a lot of students are also getting access to this, they're you're applying against other hundreds of other students because it is public information. Uh if there you see a job posting, typically there are a few hundred other people that are applying to the same job and you are one of the many that are trying to compete and generally speaking there's likely someone that's going to be a better candidate than you more than likely. And that's because that you might not necessarily fit the qualifications. And so this is where it's important to be intentional about what is it that you're exactly applying to and how do you match your own skill sets to be able to qualify for that position. The other scenario that people do apply to is they go to like a national known internship program. A very popular one that many of our students have applied to is Cosmos, which I'm sure you many people here who are in the STEM fields are probably familiar with. And uh people who know this program know that it's a very competitive program. More than a thousand different applicants apply each year. And that is what makes it even more difficult to even apply for this. And even though it's uh great to have this onto your application, it doesn't necessarily mean that by just be able by having Cosmos on your resume means that you're guaranteed to get into college. Uh it is helpful, right? Every single experience is additive, meaning that no matter what you do, it's going to be helpful. But just getting into a competitive program doesn't necessarily mean it's going to like guarantee that you will get into colleges. And same goes for if you're applying to graduate school or medical school in the future. Just because you go to a highly prestigious university like Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford doesn't necessarily mean you're guaranteed to even get to medical school either. You still have to try. And so know that just because something is seen as prestigious doesn't mean that it might not be the best option for you. The reason for that is because you can't really control your experience. Things are kind of laid out for you. It's a program that is intentionally designed to apply a certain curriculum. And the thing is uh what if you want to learn something different? What if you want to uh try to create something but you end up not even learning about it? Or maybe the thing that you want to learn is at the last week or there's only one day in the curriculum that it's covered. So the the trade-off of this is that you don't get to define what that experience is and it's not that personalized. So what's the secret, right? How do you actually even uh get these internships? And uh if you don't apply through job postings, you don't apply to these competitive programs, then what is it that you're supposed to do? Well, as I mentioned, right? Uh let's uh take a little step back and first understand why do jobs exist in the first place, right? And well, jobs exist, right? Let's let's think back about economics. Hopefully, if you are a senior, you probably have taken economics or if you're about to be if you're you're in high school, you will eventually learn this, which is uh in economics, someone is willing to pay someone to alleviate a pain or to make them happier. So, for example, um when you're hungry, you go to a restaurant and you're willing to pay money to purchase this particular food because you are uh experiencing this pain. Uh same goes for a craving. you know, I love to go drink boba after like a stressful day. And so, I'm trying to alleviate my stress by going to a boba shop and to be able to purchase that. And that's why these jobs exist in the first place because someone has a challenge and they want to be able to pay someone to uh to alleviate that challenge. And so if you know that someone is willing to pay someone to alleviate that pain, then you just kind of assign the roles here. That's someone that's willing to pay someone, that's the employers, right? Think about the employers that have those challenges. And you as a student are that person that can alleviate the that pain. But remember, you have to understand what their pain is, which is the awareness piece. And you have to understand what skill sets you need in order to alleiate that pain, which is the skill sets. So there's the awareness piece right with the observation of what it what it is which is through shadowing and then the skill sets which is through the uh project based learning here. And so if you want someone to pay you, you have to generate high value. And there's a simple equation where value is just a an a equation of benefits minus costs. And so we're going to touch upon each of these individual factors so that you understand about how can you uh evaluate your own or evaluate your child's uh benefit and cost. So starting with the benefits right benefits are just the skill sets that you're able to bring to the work and it usually separates down to the hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are typically defined as the teachable abilities or skill sets that you can quantify. You know, usually you do you learn this through class or training and you're able to uh you uh do this particular skill for a particular job or ## How to Reduce Attention Cost and Increase Independence [11:45] task. And so that might look like coding uh kind of uh writing documents or sales or video production or any of this these things. These are things that you might typically learn in school. Uh the soft skills are more the people skills or interpersonal skills. These are the things that are hard to quantify but it's usually acquired via experience. And for students, you usually exper you usually get this through your leadership uh uh leadership positions within these clubs. When you participate in communities or in clubs or in projects, you're gaining soft skills uh throughout this entire experience and that is easily transferred to any other type of project or workplace. And so that might look like you know collaboration, persuasion, uh delegation, confidence, all these things are really important. So something to consider for yourself, how much hard skills or soft skills have you developed so far? What are your gaps? And do you even have anything to offer to this company? And more than likely, right, if you're a high school student, it's likely no, right? And that's okay, right? Um, and just so uh you're aware, majority of other high school students do not have too many hard skills or soft skills just yet. But if you understand what is required, right, that already sets you apart because that makes you aware of what hard skills or soft skills you need to develop and then you could focus your time on developing them. So just by being aware self-aware of yourself about what your gaps are, what your strengths are that is way better than 80 90% of high other high school students who have no clue what types of things that they can offer. So just by doing that self-evaluation is going to be critical. And so next goes into cost. The cost of uh there's two things the financial cost and attention cost. Financial costs are just typically uh things to um to pay for this particular uh person or position. So that typically looks like the uh the wage or the stipen to afford this person. Also know that just to onboard someone onto a team or company, it costs money to purchase them equipment like a computer or laptop or even software. Maybe you have to buy a Microsoft Office license or some type of like Photoshop license or something. And there's also costs regarding like the um the cost to onboard you, recruit you, go through the training, uh administrative things. There's a lot of cost associated with just hiring one person. And hence, if you think about it, right, uh there's so much cost associated with internships. That's why it's so hard to find internships because usually there's very little benefit to interns. Uh and going into the last thing, which is attention cost. And this is the thing that uh a lot of people fail to recognize, right? It's not that you are expensive to purchase your wage or anything like that. It's not that people are cheap and they don't want to pay you, but it's more so they don't want to spend their time on you in terms of the amount of time going towards supervision, training you, onboarding you, like telling you what you need to do. Think about all the times if you're a student, think about all the times when your parent had to tell you to do something, right? That is an attention cost. And for parents, it's like same goes for you. Think about all the times that you told your student or your your child to do something because you had to remind them to take out the trash, to brush your teeth, or do something, right? Those are the attention costs that are associated even in the workplace. And so, in order to be a highly valuable person, you either have to do two things. One is to increase your benefit of what you can offer or reduce the amount of cost. Whether that's about how much it costs to be able to afford you or the main thing that you can control as a student is the attention cost. If you can be independent, right? And this is where ## How to Build Reach with Weak Connections + High Influence [15:30] it's so important to be able to do these work-based learning projects or to do passion projects where you are taking initiative to create these things out of like just pure motivation. It's because that you are willing to do something without anyone telling you what to do. So the more time that you practice a particular skill set that you get so used to it, uh your attention costs go down because you are more independent that you that people don't need to worry about you. And so uh this is something to also reflect for yourself. How often is it that an adult needs to watch over your back and tell you what exactly you need to do? How independent are you to be able to do things yourself? Whether that's like, you know, cooking for yourself or even like managing your own time and your own homework, right? Does someone have to remind you about what to do? If if not, then that's amazing. That's great. That means your attention costs are low. So then that means that you could just focus on the benefits. If you are a student and you recognize that, oh yeah, a lot of people always have to tell me what to do. Okay, great. dependency. You got to stop for the independence part because even if you have a lot of benefits, but it costs a lot to be able to make sure that you're on track or that you can show up to work on time or that you can uh that you had to be told about what to do every single step of the way. Then it it's too costly to even have you. Okay, so let's just say right that you have high value, you discovered what type of skill sets that you need to build, right? And then the next part is how do you the next question you probably have is how do you actually get the internship or job? And that's a great question, but also something to consider is your value is going to be perceived differently by every employer. Okay? Meaning that even if you self assess that I have a lot of skill sets in my hard skills, my soft skills, I have low um like attention cost uh and I believe that I'm highly valuable. your value is going to be perceived differently because every single employer has different needs, right? For example, if I were to um uh apply to two different companies that I really want uh to work for. Let's just say uh I don't know Tesla versus Toyota. Uh that's the only ones I can think of. Uh they're both car companies, right? And the thing is they're both probably working on different things. Maybe Tesla is really working on like AI technology and they're looking for more people that can support their AI projects, but Toyota, maybe they're just more focused on the uh kind of reliability and the sustainability of their uh materials that they're using. So maybe instead of focusing on AI, they're more worried about manufacturing. So even though you are interested in cars and that you want to build your skill set to build cars, every single company has a different need that they're looking to fulfill and that's your job to be able to understand as a student what is it that I can do to provide value for that and what are their needs. So the next question then becomes like how do you actually find the employers who have a need that you can fulfill your skill sets? Think of it as like a matchmaking process. How can you identify those people that can benefit from uh what I've been developing this whole time and uh recognize that my value is is positive. And there's this uh really great quote that I um that is from uh MJ Demarco which I really love. Uh it's from a book the million air fast lane. Highly recommend it especially to the parents who love reading books about like economics and uh and financial health. But attributing success to luck is partially true. Success is about creating processes that increases your probability of luck to occur. What that means, right, is you have to constantly put yourself out there to increase your uh the the probability of luck being able to occur. If you are uh putting like talking to more people for example, if you are connecting with different organizations, if you are um constantly being seen on like social media for a uh for your particular skill, you have more eyes on you and that is increasing your reach and that can potentially lead to higher rates of success because you never know if the people that you're reaching to can lead you to that uh to that success. And so then the question ## Step-by-Step....How to Create Your Own Internship [20:00] becomes how might you increase your value and your reach. Okay. Uh so remember that we talked about value. Value is an association of your uh benefits minus your costs, right? Thinking about how is it that you can provide value. But you need to increase the reach of people that you're able to connect with because you can be a highly valued person but if you have low reach then no one's going to know who you are and what like what you even have to offer. And and vice versa, if you have high reach but very low value, then you can be connected with everyone, but you might not be able to provide anyone anything because you don't have as much value. So now that we talked about value, right? Uh now we talk about reach. And reach is really a combination or equation of your number of connections and your inputs. So let's start off with the number of connections. There are two types of connections. There's your deep connections and your weak connections. Your deep connections are your highly established high-quality relationships that you've known for a very long time. These are people who share very similar experiences uh information opportunities. So these tend to be like the your family members and teachers or mentors who have a deep understanding of who you are. These are the people that you see on a daily basis, right? The people that you go to school with, the people that you live at home with. These are your deep connections because they know you well. And also the uh other alternative that a lot of people don't think realize is really important is your weak connections. Your weak connections are your relationships that you don't really have too much information about, but at the same time, they're not in your inner circle. They're not in your community. They are people that you have maybe a low commitment to. Uh meaning that you don't have as frequent interactions with them, but you still have a touch point with them. And that touch point becomes even more important to actually nurture. And what I mean by that is uh think this way. If you met someone for the first time, right? And uh you've only met them once and you see them again one year later and you still remember them. You remember that weak connection, but it becomes highly influential in terms of um what you recall from that one interaction from a long time ago. And this weak connection we're going to go into a little bit more. I'm going to make it more clear in just a bit. But these can typically be your colleague or family a friend of a family and a friend. And so uh I I'll go back to the weak connections and why this all connects. But uh first off the next part is the uh influence. Okay. When it comes to influence you there's two types of influence. There's the high influence. These are the people within the organization that have high credibility and trust in the workplace. Maybe they are a manager. Maybe they are in a position of power. maybe they have a lot of uh of ability to um make changes within their uh company. And also if you're a high school senior right now and that doesn't make sense, well, think of it as like your principal or your vice principal. They might have a lot of influence within your school. Uh they these people have a deep understanding of the organization and also they oversee the budget or the personnel decisions. These are the decision makers within the organization. And the last piece is the low influence. These are people who don't have that much uh ability to change things in the workplace. They have low credibility, low trust. They have little understanding of how the organization works and they have no positional power to be able to make any budgetary decisions. These are kind of like new employees, entry- level roles. They uh don't necessarily provide too much ability to um uh to to create an impact for you or to support you. So what this means right uh is that in order to maximize your reach right you actually have to take in consideration of your weak connections and your high influence people. Those are the kind of the two kind of uh metrics that are really important. The reason for that is because the weak connections right these are people that you want to network with because they have access to opportunities that you don't know of. And if you can ideally connect with a uh somebody who has a high influence, then these are the people that are going to be really critical to be able to help you in the long term. So when it comes to this back to this diagram here of the high value, high reach, right? You want to be intentional that in order to increase your reach, you need to get out of your bubble. You can't just connect with the people who are only in your family or in your school, but you need to step outward. And you can potentially ask your deep connections to connect you with somebody else. And that becomes your weak connection. And those people can potentially have a high influence to help you become seen. And so the goal here, right, again, is to uh create more weak connections with the people who have high influence. And that's really going to be able to help you get into this next step of creating your own internship. All right. So now we're going to go into the step-by-step process about how do you create your own internships using what we just learned and also I'll give you examples of how I was able to do that as well. So there's a six-step process that you're just able to do and again this is like a way to leverage your value and your reach. So first off is to develop a list of organizations that you might personally identify with. And to start off with that you have to kind of reflect on yourself. uh what are the skills and experiences that you might have? So for myself uh back in the day I was very good at Tableau data analytics policy implementation my expertise is in K through2 education college admissions and workforce development and I had particular strong values and interests in public policy education East San Jose right and from there by using the self-reflection I can think about okay what are the organizations that I might potentially have a good fit with that I can work for or potentially provide value for so that led me to three organizations I identified policy link uh which is a policy advocacy organization, Silicon Valley Education Foundation which is on more education policy and then also the city of San Jose because that is my alma matter hometown and so going the next part I had to identify who are the people that I can connect with. uh these are the people who have the high influence I told you about and I want to uh develop these weak relationships and so I would look up the city of San Jose economic development staff and I would find a whole bunch of people who I can reach out to and uh I took my shot and uh I emailed all the people who are in these leadership positions and oh that is the wrong order excuse me you. Okay, let me go back to here. Okay. Uh oh, why is this the wrong order? Apologies for that. Okay, so the next part is initiating the contact and trying to schedule. So, I reached out to the uh deputy director of the uh office of economic development. And many people don't really realize that like, oh yeah, that's a really high position. And would they ever even try to respond to me? And um what I tried to do though was if you notice within my email, I actually mentioned somebody who was a deep connection with me, which is his name was Eddie. And Eddie was someone who I worked with in my uh workplace and I had him introduce me to that person. So this is the power of networking. You ask someone who's in your deep connections to connect you uh to create a weak connection with somebody else that has high influence. So, I went to this meeting, had uh Eddie uh int I asked him if he can introduce me to her so that I could be able to network with her and learn more about her um her uh department so that way ## How to Lead an Informational Interview Like a Pro [28:00] maybe I could potentially work uh for her and from there uh and uh fortunately she did respond and uh because of that the next part was that was to uh try to prepare what's called an informational interview. An informational interview is essentially instead of you being interviewed for a job, you're interviewing that to learn more information about either their job, their company, or just who they are generally speaking. So before you even go into that conversation with that other person, you want to first understand what their goals are. What is it that you want to learn from the interview? What are the objectives that you want to make sure? For me, it was really about I want to get a job. That was my clear objective. I wanted to go in and be able to ensure that I can uh use them as a summer internship and um but it's not just about going in there and just saying like hey I want to get a internship can you give me that internship like no it's not like that uh you have to be able to understand again what's your value that you can provide and so you have to come in not just with the objective to ask for internship but you have to come with the objective of understanding what are their needs right remember that's what we talked about in order to uh provide high value you have to understand um what their needs are so that you can uh market your value in or frame it in a way that is more digestible to them. So next part is to research the interviewee. So I would go in and uh look up anything I could find online about their background, their career path, their current role and just understand what uh what are they working on. So I would look up the office of economic development and try to figure out what are the projects that they were really investing at the moment. And during that time it was really about um the uh Google village being built in the city of San Jose. That was something that was like a hot topic that I was like trying to uh break into a bit more. And so prepare thoughtful questions, right? Try to be able to not just ask them like hey uh what's your job or what do you do? Right? That's like uh yes that's that's a reason that's a reasonable question but I can also Google that I can just figure that out through an online search and especially with AI nowadays you can find a lot of stuff now through AI so ask the questions that were really meaningful that is that only they can answer for example like why did you decide to enter this particular role right or what um can you tell me about how did you end up like working uh in this role like within the past few what kind of led you up to this moment uh to be in this role and like oh what drives you what interests you right being able to ask the questions that are thoughtprovoking those thoughtprovoking questions is what creates a strong impact uh that people will remember you for so focusing on their experiences their insights and their advice is really what's going to help them uh remember you and be able to create a strong impression on you uh reach out for an interview So send a polite and professional request via LinkedIn or email and just also introduce yourself about why you're interested in speaking with them. And then lastly, just confirming the details when they do respond and be able to uh agree on whether you're going to meet on Zoom or in person and you know just thank them for their time because they're taking the time out of their day to ch chat with you. Next, when you actually conduct the interview, this is where uh not a lot of people realize that they need to develop the skills on how to network and how to talk to other people, especially when you're a high school student, right? It's it like how common are you actually talking to strangers, right? Not often because usually you're talking to the same community of students and teachers uh for for four years. And so, uh one of the things you I stress that people need to do is practice this. practice this with a friend, with a family, or with a coach on how to conduct these informational interviews. So, first off is to just start off with small talk, right? Just getting to know them, build rapport, like be likable, right? You don't want to just like go in and just go in with a list of questions, be like, "Hey, what do you do for your job?" Or like, you know, you don't want to make it this interrogation. You want to make it like a friendly conversation. Uh, second, provide a brief overview of your background interest because they have no clue who you are, right? So, and also they probably had a busy day. So try to bring them up to speed and context about who you are, what you're doing, and what you're looking for. Uh ask your questions, you know, engage in a dialogue. It's not a Q&A. It's more so about a back and forth conversation. It's very similar to the way that we coaches like talk to the students, right? You we go back and forth. We're not just asking questions all the time. We're try we're trying to have conversations and dialogue back and forth with each other. And then really uh try to listen actively and show genuine interest. uh keep aware of your body posture, keep aware of like how you're engaging in active listening and just show that you're being very present, seeking advice, right? Uh this is where you can ask for support on uh give you guidance on, hey, what should I do for my career? I really want to break into computer science. I really want to break into premed. Uh what do you think that I can do to be able to do that? And ## Real Email Examples + How to Propose a Project [33:00] then you can ask them for the next steps after that. So once you've got their advice, uh this is where the action piece comes in. And if you developed a very strong conversation and dialogue up to this point, it's likely that they might be invested to help you out. And throughout this time, what the kind of um kind of uh art to do or learn how to do is how do you kind of blend in talking about yourself while also asking questions? because it's not just you trying to learn more about this person, but you're trying to use it as a way to share about your interests, your skills, your motivations, and that potentially when you talk about the next steps, they can give you a better sense of how they can help you. So, for example, they you might want to inquire about if there's anybody else that they can talk to that might have opportunities. You can ask them if you can uh keep in touch for future advice or if they have an opportunity at the workplace. And also at the very end, just thank them for their time and their insights. And then it's always a nice courtesy to follow up with like an thank you email uh about what you learned and what you uh valued. So that way they can create that strong impression with you. All right. So let's say after you're done with that uh that informational interview, next it goes into um what what now, right? like uh you you had a conversation with them and you learned a bit more about their particular needs um at the workplace and what they're working on. From there, that's when you connect the dots to them. You think about about your skills and experiences and interests that you have, right? And try to be able to connect it to what their needs of the organization that you learned from that information. What are the shared interests? What are the overlapping things that you think that you can help out with? So going back to the informational interview, this was a way for you to be able to uh get to know about their needs, to be able to share about yourself, and to also uh ask for advice about your own like kind of career growth and your own learning. And ideally for theseformational interviews, right, you want to try to maximize these conversations up to like 30 minutes or so. And so many high school students who I've talked to um who actually I practice informational interviews with or that they did informational interviews with me, they end it in like five to 10 minutes, which is like so short, right? And it's like one of those things like this is the time to be able to really maximize the session and really be able to dig in deep and use it to uh figure out how you can support them or how they can support you. And so the next piece is also u once you kind of figured out what are the shared interests then is to define the role. To define the role right it's it's as simple as as such as a Google search about what are the specific um internships that might relate to this uh particular role. So, for example, if you are trying to get into a marketing internship, there are tons of job roles or descriptions online for a marketing intern uh or even for a business analyst intern or for an computer science intern. Look up on Google just on like what are the typical day-to-day activities that they do and then try to use that as a way to propose that this is something that you can do for them. Uh and also to consider when you're actually um within this uh company as well. Uh try to identify if the person that you want to work with or the company you work with is there someone that can support you as a mentor and that can teach you because it's not just a matter of like getting into a company or getting into internship but you want to maximize for your learning experience. who are the people that you can be able to learn from and uh be willing to invest into you. And so after you had that conversation with them, then you could uh follow up with a portfolio and to be able to uh reach out and uh thank them for their time and also send them what is it that you've been working on. So, this example of an email that I sent over saying like I really appreciate their time and also here's like some things that I like have worked on in the past that I think that would be able to help the project that you're working on. And so, this is a wrong one. This example of what that portfolio looked like here that I sent over. It was like a whole presentation along with some dashboards I was able to create. And then from there, um, going through back and forth conversations over time, that's what eventually landed me into that internship that I was able to get paid for. So this is an example of a way to be able to create those internships while being able to by through providing value uh by understanding what are your benefits that you can provide uh without while mitigating the costs and also trying to leverage your reach or your network uh by creating those connections whether they're strong or weak connections along with the high influence people. So that's like a kind of a strategy here again as a quick recap to be able to uh create your own internship experience. Now I know that that that ## How to Use This to Boost College Admissions [38:00] seems like pretty difficult but it is very much possible right uh in terms of some of the students that we have helped it has definitely been the case where uh usually a lot of students where they first start off is by reaching out to their uh family and friends or most likely yeah their family or their family's friends. Those are usually the first places to start off with because they those are already established connections. And so you might not necessarily do like the cold outreaching like the way that I did here. But when it comes to leveraging your own network, the best way to do it is to start with who do you have who in your family is working in your your industry of interest right now and ask them if there's anybody that you can potentially talk to to conduct theseformational interviews and potentially get an internship. All right. So, all right. So, now we're going to go into the resources and next steps. Uh, so I hope folks did enjoy that uh those yeah, those learnings on how to be able to acquire an internship. If you have any questions uh please throw it in the chat uh while I go through resources and next steps and then we'll end it with Q&A. So, first off, if you really like this presentation and you really enjoyed it, uh please text uh notes and replay to 9497750865 and then we'll send it over to you. Uh the replay and notes will typically be available in 24 to 48 hours. Also, uh quick announcement for those who don't know. Uh Eagle is having our first ever summit. And in the summit, we're actually going to be having a uh a live Zoom session where we're going to talk a lot about like what is the newest up-to-date strategies about uh about how to get into college, what is it that we learned from all the conferences that we've been to within this past year, and what exactly is it that uh the admissions officers are looking for. So, we're going to go into a super deep dive uh into how to stand out in the whole personal pro uh the personal statement, the uh application, and we'll also talk about some financial aid and scholarships on how to uh reduce the loan burden that you would have to do. And uh we'll talk about some of the extracurriculars or competitive majors that uh you can apply into and how to be able to stand out. This is going to be uh catered to all high school students and parents for 9th to 12th grade. Uh also we invite school counselors and educators if you like to be a part of this and also administrators and community leaders because it's possible that we might share some information that you can share with your local uh families. And so we expect that there's going to be a lot of people joining this about more than a thousand other families that will be there. So uh it's free. Uh just register on eagleok.com/summit or if you want to text our phone number texts summit and then we'll be able to send you that link. And next we'll talk about what we offer for our internship or research program. So let's just say uh everything that I said so far was super overwhelming because there's a lot of like kind of work required in order to create your internship which is understandable right and it's one of those things where think about it if you were to apply to uh college and you describe that whole process that you just did right that is going to stand out because you put in the work to be able to create that experience for yourself. Uh but at the same time, some people might not have time and that's okay. Uh so we have our own research program, internship program that you can take advantage of and these are only for coaching families. So if you want to participate in our research program, it's a 12-week program where you will be matched with a professor one-on-one to be able to create an independent research paper of your interest. So your professor is going to be your mentor to guide you through the research process and how to conduct your independent research. and potentially in the future you can use it to get publicized. This will help you stand on the admissions process and also at the same time you will be able to add a uh professor into your own network that hopefully you have a long-term relationship with. And uh on the plus side, if you wanted to spend a little extra money, you can receive credit from UC San Diego Extension if you were to purchase it directly from the university. This is a paid add-on for our coaching families. So this isn't uh a part of our coaching programs that you you might be already be part of. Uh so just be aware that there might be an additional cost. So if you text research, we can send you a link to be able to schedule a consultation call so you learn more about what this program really entails. The second part is our own internship program. So this is a 8week program where students will be able to uh work for a virtual based startup where they can create a real world project and get that first uh uh work experience on their belt. Uh no experience is required and uh you're going to be matched with a startup that is aligned with your interest. So if you're interested in AI then we'll match you with you know a tech company that's working on AI stuff. If you're interested in I don't know um robotics then we'll do the same for for you as well. And whatever it doesn't matter what field it is. Our goal is to match you to a virtual startup that is uh that can give you that uh summer experience or actually it doesn't have to be summer, it could be fall or spring as well. So there's different timelines, but if you want to take advantage for this summer, you totally can. So it's not too late. And also you'll get a letter of completion by the company and potentially that uh your supervisor can write you a letter of recommendation um in the future. This is usually 5 to 10 hours per week of work. So you can stack academic courses with the internship program or the research program. Uh so there shouldn't be any concerns about whether if you can balance uh this internship program with something else. Um and uh think about their logistics and also oh yeah with this internship program you'll be able to have meetings with leadership as well. Um the goal is to be able to expose the student to multiple people in the company and learn more about them. So this is a practice of those informational interviews and networking skills that we talked about. So, if you want any of these resources, text notes, replay or summit or internship or research to 949-7750865 and we'll send that over to you. All right. Next, we're going to go into Q&A. So, does anyone have any questions about anything that I've talked about so far? Okay. Someone said, "I got a little lost at at the end." Sorry. So sorry about that. Did you create your own internship opportunity, design the actual role or did you apply to existing internship? If you create it, could you talk a little bit more about how you designed the role and pitch it to the company? Thanks. Yeah. So it was creating that opportunity. So I created a job description. I I gave them like a scope of work and telling them like, hey, if you hire me, I will be able to deliver on X, Y, and Z. And so, uh, this is like through a conversation that I I go back and forth with the employer and try to understand like, hey, uh, what is it that you're working on right now? I want to better understand what is it that I might be able to do for you. And so, uh, this was usually through actually through like a lot of emails back and forth, uh, to be able to, uh, understand what exactly are they looking for out of that summer. So, I try to kind of pitch them like what the value that I could provide there. All right. Any other questions? In the past webinar, you mentioned the idea of doing gigs. I think the example is graphic design. Would this be as impressive as an internship? Uh so the uh well it is still very much impressive. Uh I would say internships is a little bit more elaborate. The reason for that is because internships is much more thor uh value to a particular problem. When it comes to gigs, usually it's like kind of like a lot of customers like oneoff uh kind of needs and so it might not be as a thoughtful thing because someone's just telling you what they need or what they want you to do. An internship is much more about like being able to understand what is the value that you can provide and what are the issues and then you try to creatively come up with the solution. So anyways, gigs are always good. uh internships are much more in uh much more in-depth and that those can always like stand out a bit more because it shows critical thinking. Uh those gigs can definitely become like somewhat internship like right where like you might be more consult consultative uh meaning that you ask them a few more questions or you try to deeply understand what kind of graphic design needs that they have and then you go back and forth on that. So it definitely can evolve into something as impressive as an internship as long as how you describe it. At the end of the day, right, when it comes to these application or activities, it's really about how do you market it? How do you frame it in your um in your essays? Uh talk about internships, research programs that would align to a line of study in dentistry. So at least for dentistry, the way I would approach it is first start off with shadowing, right? That's what we talked about in one of the first slides. um have them go to a local uh dentist clinic and try to see if there's any volunteer opportunity that they can do. And then from there, uh try to encourage your student to uh try to uh figure out what are the kind of needs that they might have at the local dentist office. Is there something that uh they might need additional support with? And usually it's like front desk work, right? It's not like expected that uh a a student is going to be able to be a dental assistant whatsoever. Uh, of course the I I don't think any like application reviewer would be able to like anyways it's like it's very rare that's like very almost impossible but uh by being able to do that um some things like could be like front desk work uh organizing filing uh some other things too um is taking the use of like personal projects as well like spreading dental campaign awareness in some type of way whether that is uh at the school or whether that is online when it comes to like more uh it's really hard to get dental experience specifically, but you could do research about dental health. And so this kind of goes into like research programs as well that can relate to that. I mean, I'm sure there are professors that do study things about dental health and that can be something that they can potentially um uh look for. What kind of internships are there for premed students? Uh so yeah uh premed students it's a lot more difficult of course right like as I said the way to kind of go about it is through the local clinics uh some other places like Kaiser or some other hospitals might have like high very competitive high school volunteering u programs that you could apply to. Uh those are totally fine as well. Uh though just know that you don't need to necessarily get into those competitive programs just to be able to get into prestigious universities. Uh, I would say that most premed students will typically rely on research as opposed to like hands-on uh medical experience. Uh, that's that's usually from what we've seen of our students that do get in. They are able to like do some type of research about a particular health issue that they really care about. And usually that might be connected to their own personal stories about uh maybe their family was affected by one of these particular health issues. And so they sought out a professor that was doing research about this particular topic and that expanded their interest to go into premed because they know that they need a degree in order to uh study the health impacts or the um the underlying issues of this health condition. So again, it's about how you connect the dots, how you frame it, right? Of what what kind of led you to that interest of premed and what are the specific experiences that you need to learn to really validate that this is what you really want to do. And it it can also be like even as small as like um uh let's see like doing a health education campaign at school or uh and when I mean a health education campaign sometimes like some students they uh do clubs where uh for example anti-tobacco Friday night live that's one of the clubs where they spread awareness to talking about the harms of smoking in different like classrooms and so they would go classroom to classroom to talk about the harms of And that's a good example of like uh a personal project that they can highlight. It's not exactly like an internship, but it can become an internship if like you were to think outside of the school cuz sometimes there's some community organizations that work on these health issues that you can be able to support. All right, any other questions? All right. Well, it was a pleasure chatting with everyone. Hope folks really enjoyed today's uh webinar. So, looking forward to be able to uh hear how everyone's uh internship experiences go or their summer experiences go. And if you have any questions, feel free to follow up in my office hours. Uh and my office hours are on Thursdays uh between 4 to 5:00 p.m. Right. Uh take care everyone and have a good rest of the day.