How to Get an Internship With No Experience

You open a posting that looks perfect, scroll down to requirements, and there it is: "prior internship experience preferred." For an internship. It feels like a trap. How are you supposed to get experience if every door wants experience first?

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: almost everyone applying for their first internship is in exactly your spot. That's what internships are for. The people reading applications know they're hiring students. They aren't looking for a résumé that already looks like a job. They're looking for proof you can do the work, show up, and learn fast.

And you probably have more of that proof than you think.

"No experience" usually means "no job title"

When students say they have no experience, what they usually mean is that nothing on their résumé says Intern yet. But you've done things. A class project you actually built. A part-time job where you dealt with real customers. A club where you ran an event and it didn't fall apart.

Every one of those is a record of you doing work, with other people, on a deadline. That's the whole thing an internship manager is trying to figure out.

What counts (more than you'd expect)

• Class projects. Anything you built, analyzed, designed or wrote that took more than a week. Group projects especially, because they show you can work with people.
• Personal projects. A small app, a data analysis, a portfolio, a research write-up. It doesn't need users. It needs to exist and work.
• Part-time and summer jobs. Retail, food service, tutoring, lifeguarding. Managers worry most about whether an intern is reliable, and a job proves you are.
• Clubs and organizations. Especially if you ran something: a budget, an event, recruitment, a newsletter.
• Research or TA work. Helping a professor counts, and it's directly relevant for almost any analytical role.
• Volunteering. Counts the same as a job when you describe what you actually did.

Write each one as something you did

The gap between a weak résumé line and a strong one is almost always the verb and the result.

Weak: "Member of the marketing club."

Stronger, for example: "Ran Instagram for the marketing club; grew it from 200 to 900 followers in one semester by posting three times a week."

The formula: what you did, what you did it with, and what changed. No number? Describe the scale instead: how many people, how often, how long. Every line should be something you could talk about for two minutes in an interview without notes.

Build one thing that proves the skill

If the roles you want ask for a skill you've only used in class, build one small thing with it. Want data roles? Pick a public dataset and answer one real question. Design? Redesign one screen of an app you use every day and explain why. Software? Ship one small tool that works and put the code somewhere people can read it.

One finished project that matches the job beats five half-finished ones. It also gives you the best possible answer when someone asks, "tell me about something you've worked on."

Aim at the roles built for you

Some internships exist specifically for students without prior internships. Look for:

• Early-career programs at big employers. Many run programs just for first- and second-years, often called "explore", "discovery" or "early insight" programs.
• Smaller companies and startups. They tend to hire later in the season and care more about what you've built than the keywords on your résumé.
• Research with professors at your own school.
• On-campus jobs close to your field: labs, IT help desks, the campus paper, the career center.

Apply when the most seats are open

Timing matters way more than most of us realize. Big employers open summer programs months in advance, often August through October of the year before. Apply in spring and you're competing for whatever's left. More on that in When to Apply for Summer Internships.

What doesn't help

Sending the same résumé to hundreds of postings. It feels productive, but the average tech internship posting drew 273 applications in the 2024–25 cycle (Handshake Internships Index 2025, tech-only), so one more generic application gets lost in the pile. Twenty applications to roles that actually fit, each with one line that shows you read the posting, will do more than two hundred that don't. We broke down the numbers in How Many Internships Should You Apply To?.

If this search feels exhausting, that's normal. It isn't a sign you're behind. It's a sign you're doing it.

Where UTern fits

UTern reads internship listings straight from employer career pages, ranks them against what you've actually done, and helps you prepare each application. You review it and press submit. It's free for students. Browse live internships.