How to get a summer internship as a 1st year undergrad student?

Currently a 1st year A&F student at a UK university and have had no luck with Spring Weeks this cycle due to being unprepared (how the fuck are we expected to prepare these applications before university even starts??).

I understand this lowers my chances of getting any summer internships this cycle, but I was thinking I should apply anyway.

No structured summer internship opportunities for any banks are for 1st year students, they are all for 2nd years at least.

I was thinking of emailing a list of firms given by the LSE application tracker but not sure how to approach this / if this is a bad idea?

4 Comments
 

Yes good idea. There are several guides out there to go about getting a 1st year summer (e.g. check the LSEBIG Insta page, there's a speculative summer internship guide in their bio that covers cold-emailing for an internship). Cast your net more broadly than the list on the LSE page, as many students will be using that.

 
Most Helpful

What I did when in your position(different school) I just cold emailed a shit ton of local firms. Most of the time they wouldn’t respond or they would just say no. In a few cases they offered to have a chat and ended up giving me a referral to a small firm where he knew the founder. Most people wouldn’t want to do this, and I honestly wouldn’t either, but you can also mention the possibility of being unpaid.

 

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