Career-Ready, Set, Go

An internship is still one of the best ways to land a full-time job.

Practicum, field placement, internship—no matter what you call it, work-based learning is a critical part of any student’s career preparation. Not only do these experiences introduce students to their chosen career and help confirm or rule out job choices, they are the surest path to a full-time job.

“Employers are more likely to convert interns to new hires than any other kind of positions,” says Saskia Campbell, executive director of University Career Services (UCS) at George Mason University. “That's their recruitment strategy. That's their pipeline.”

And Campbell says Mason students are in demand.

During the 2022-23 academic year, employers posted 29,729 internships on UCS’s Handshake job search site. That’s doubled from a pre-pandemic 13,558 postings in 2019-20.

Beyond Handshake, Mason students find internships by leveraging their personal connections and relationships with faculty who have close ties to federal agencies, government contractors and nonprofit organizations in the Washington, D.C., area.  Some Mason students are even interning abroad through a program in Mason’s Global Education Office.

In this feature, we take a look at some of the Mason undergraduates who held internships in the summer of 2023.

 

A linguistics scholar designs mysteries in the Library of Congress

 

DOD internship is a key part of this accounting major’s experiential learning

 

Law student’s summer internship combines his love of flight and law

 

This Mason student manages her talents on and off stage