The Five Stages of Grief Applied to Internship Searching

As soon as you step on campus as a junior, the pressure is on to find an internship for the summer, which will hopefully lead to having a post-grad job. But internships aren’t just for juniors anymore. Sophomores and even freshman are searching for internships to get ahead of the game so they can gain experience and hopefully not live in a box after graduation. Internship hunting is quite possibly the least fun way to spend your Sunday afternoon. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described how we feel about this perfectly when she created the five stages of grief.

Denial

This is the stage where you decide that you really don’t even need an internship. It usually comes around the time when you’ve been looking online for four hours without finding anything that interests you. Sitting on your couch all summer sounds way more appealing anyway.

Anger

Internship anger involves being angry at your field/society/everyone for making it almost necessary to get an internship if you want a job after graduation. Totally unreasonable to be angry at nobody, but it makes you feel better.

Bargaining

At some point in your internship search you’ll probably start bargaining with yourself with things you can do besides intern. Studying abroad for the summer sounds really tempting when you’ve spent the last ten weeks looking for internships with no success. And it’ll make you seem cultural, right?

Depression

This is when you decide that you’re never going to find an internship and you’re just going to live at home with your parents after graduation until you’re at least 30. This is also the stage where you decide to spend your weekend binge watching Netflix instead of applying for even more internships.

Acceptance

Acceptance is hopefully where you finally get an offer at a company you love and you can accept your dream internship. Your hard work has finally paid off and you can rest assured that you get to spend the summer doing what you love.

Internship searching isn’t easy, but we promise it’ll be worth it in the end.