With the economy still in shambles, landing an internship might be the best way to get a foot in the door of a company that might hire you someday. But finding even an unpaid internship can be difficult. So here's a list of resources that are designed to help prospective interns achieve their professional goals.
If you're just looking for job search engines, check out our roundup from earlier this year.
Get your internship
BuddingUp: BuddingUp is a site that helps interns and recent graduates find the jobs they want. The site is broken into two sections: a job board and a career page listing. The former lists all the jobs the site has found across the Web that might be of interest to prospective interns. Unfortunately, you can't search it easily, so you'll be forced to scroll through the pages to get what you're looking for, which is not very convenient.
But the career pages listing is a fantastic resource. Instead of wasting your time going to individual company sites trying to apply for an internship, BuddingUp provides it all for you. So if you want to check for all the openings at Wal-Mart, Sony, or General Electric, the site will provide you with direct links to those individual career listings pages.
BuddingUp provides a job board to help you find your next internship.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Enternships: Enternships is a unique site that helps you find internships at Web start-ups. It requires start-ups to list their gigs, which can then be searched for by interns who can apply directly on the site.
Since Enternships was started in association with Oxford University's Oxford Entrepreneurs program, many of the jobs listed on the site are located in the U.K. There are some listings for the U.S., but if you're in the States, Enternships shouldn't top your list until more listings are added to the site.
Enternships has some growing up to do before it can make the big time.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Intern Abroad: Intern Abroad is a really neat site. Instead of helping you find an internship in North America, the site lists all the open internships listed all over the world. So if you want to work as an economics intern over the summer in China, you'll find all the open listings (13 as of this writing) for those jobs.
Intern Abroad doesn't list individual jobs on its site, though. Instead, it provides search results of companies and organizations offering internships in the country you designate. That can get annoying, since you'll be forced to jump from site to site to get what you want, but considering it's a unique service, that downside can be overlooked.
Intern Abroad helps you find internships all over the world.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Twing is launching a new site on Tuesday where you can find out what people have written about specific topics in forums and other online communities.
The site shows search results for keywords in individual posts, topics, and whole forums and allows a lot of fine tuning for results. You can choose to include or exclude specific terms and filter so you only see items in a certain time frame, items from certain sources, or those that mention specific people or companies.
Twing searches the Web for sites and allows forum owners to submit their sites to the directory. It also shows you what topics and forums are hot, listing which are the fastest growing and most active communities.
Other message board and forum search sites include BoardReader.com, BoardTracker.com, and Omgili.com.
Twing lets you use keywords to search by post, topic, or forum across a variety of message boards and online communities.
(Credit: Twing)
Don't be afraid of the creepy, mucus-like mascot. ChinSwing is a voice message board that pulls double duty as a flash audio player and voice-recorder. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately using the service requires a 4MB plug-in for both IE and Firefox.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
ChinSwing has a ton of categories for discussion, and tiny numbers (indicating topics) to help you see if there's any content within each category. There's also a just-uploaded section on the main page.
Voice messages are ordered chronologically, like a message board would be. Each discussion is separated into user submissions, and you can click on any one to play it, or you can just play the whole "discussion" from the start. The audio on several of the posts is far from studio quality, but considering most users are using their built-in laptop mics, it's still listenable.
The value of this app for the average user is questionable. Between standard message boards and YouTube, it's hard to imagine ChinSwing gaining ground as a community hot spot. It's nice that there's no registration needed to listen to the posts, but you do have download a separate app to get it going, which we think that will kill it. The technology is a neat idea, and it would be a good feature for existing message boards, but we can't see ChinSwing.com taking off on its own. In the meantime, consider it an interesting study in what the soldiers of a flame war actually sound like.
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