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Career Center provides funding for summer internships

By Jill Chipman ’14

It’s that time of year again when everyone is trying to find the perfect summer job. Many students are lucky enough to score an internship but not always one that is paid. What a lot of students don’t know is that the Hamilton Career Center offers assistance in this area and will help students with unpaid or minimally paid internships.

The Career Center has a variety of funding opportunities made possible by the donations of alumni and parents. Some of these opportunities are field or class specific. These funds are designed to cover the cost of living expenses that students may incur at a summer internship. They do not cover test preparation (LSAT, MCAT, etc.), tuition for courses or personal entertainment.

The application deadline is April 1 and can be submitted through HamNet. There are several guidelines that students must meet.  The internship or combination of internships must provide the student with at least 240 hours of experience. This equates to a 30 hour work week for eight weeks.

Shannon Shannon, assistant director of the Career Center and director of publicity and programming stresses that the student need not have an internship secured before applying for funding.  Shannon notes that the internship must be in the student’s planned career field and offer them supervised training in the appropriate setting.

Applications are considered on a 60 point scale with criteria that includes quality of the proposal, benefit to the student, demonstrated financial need W and cumulative GPA. Some applications will need to meet with the Summer Internship Funding Selection Committee to explain their proposal but not all. All applicants will be informed in mid April of the committee’s decision.

The application consists of an application form, a budget proposal and a résumé. Students must plan their budget for the summer and be able to justify their potential expenses. The budget form is predesigned and not difficult to fill out; the same is true of the application itself.

Students who are applying for internships without funding or minimal pay are strongly encouraged to apply for funding through the Career Center. There are typically 45-50 awards made each year ranging from $250 to $4,500.

Shannon stresses that it is very important that students follow the instructions as they are written and to be very careful when filling out the applications. Any questions regarding the process may be directed to Shannon Shannon, sshannon@hamilton.edu. All application materials and a list of all available funding are available on the Career Center’s page on the Hamilton website.

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