How to Get an Internship With No Experience

Everyone applying for a first internship has no experience, including the people who get them. What separates applicants at this stage is not experience but evidence: something concrete you have made, organised or finished that a stranger can look at. This page is about producing that quickly and then applying in a way that gets replies.

Start by accepting what the first one is for

Your first internship is not meant to be impressive. It is meant to give you something true to write on the second application. A small company nobody has heard of, where you do real work, is worth more than a famous name where you sit in a corner. Students who hold out for a prestigious first internship often end up with none at all.

What goes on an empty CV

You almost certainly have more than you think. Go through each of these honestly:

• College work with an outcome. A project, a paper, a presentation that someone other than your examiner saw.
• Organising anything. A fest, an event, a society, a sports team. Say how many people and how much money.
• Competitions. Entered counts, not only won. Say what you had to produce.
• Anything you built or ran. A page, an account, a small shop, a tutoring arrangement, a family business you actually helped with.
• Skills you can prove on demand. Spreadsheets, a language, a design tool, writing.

Write each as what you did, what changed, and the number. “Member of the college fest committee” is a line nobody reads. “Coordinated 40 volunteers and the registration desk for a 3 day fest with 1,200 attendees” is a line that produces a question in an interview, which is the entire purpose of a CV.

If there is genuinely nothing, make something in three weeks

This is the fastest way out of the problem, and almost nobody does it.

1. Pick the field you want the internship in.
2. Produce one piece of real work in it. For marketing, run a page for a month and report what happened. For finance, build a model of a listed company from its published annual report. For HR, write a hiring process for a small firm. For writing, publish three pieces somewhere public.
3. Write up what you did and what you learned, in one page.
4. Attach it to every application.

A hiring manager choosing between forty identical CVs and one applicant who turned up with a piece of work is not making a difficult decision. The work does not have to be good by professional standards. It has to exist.

Where to apply when you have nothing

Small and mid sized organisations, not large ones. Large companies have structured programmes with filters that screen out empty CVs automatically. Small firms hire when they need hands, judge applications individually, and often never advertise at all.

• Your own college’s placement cell, which usually has local employers who specifically take beginners.
• Internshala, which carries a large volume of entry level roles across fields, including many that state no experience is required.
• LinkedIn, both for listings and for contacting people directly.
• The AICTE National Internship Portal at internship.aicte-india.org, which is free for students and lists opportunities across sectors. It is oriented mainly towards students at AICTE approved institutions.
• Direct approaches to small firms in your city, which is the single most effective route and the one students avoid.

The cold email

Most cold emails fail because they are about the sender’s feelings rather than the recipient’s problem. Keep it to five sentences.

1. Who you are, in one line: course, year, college.
2. What you are asking for, specifically: a six week internship starting in May, in person or remote.
3. Why them, in one line, showing you know something about what they do.
4. What you can offer, with the piece of work attached.
5. A closing line that makes replying easy.

Send it to a named person. Follow up once, after a week, in two lines. Then stop and move on to the next one. Expect most to go unanswered, which is normal and not a verdict on you. Thirty well targeted emails will usually produce several conversations.

Volume, tracked

Keep a simple sheet: organisation, person, date sent, date followed up, outcome. Students who do this apply far more consistently than students who rely on memory, and consistency is most of what decides this.

Before you accept anything

No legitimate internship requires you to pay a fee. Any request for a registration charge, a training fee, a security deposit or a refundable deposit is a scam, without exception. The same is true of an offer made without any interview. If you are unsure about a listing, check whether the organisation has a working website, an email address on its own domain, and employees visible on LinkedIn.

A note for law students

If you are a law student rather than a general applicant, Lexfolio runs its own virtual internship, where interns research and write legal content that is published under their own name. It is free, applications are open on a rolling basis, and it is one way to get published writing onto a CV that does not have much on it yet.

The order to do this in

1. Rewrite your CV using what you already have, with outcomes and numbers.
2. Pick a field and make one piece of real work in three weeks.
3. List thirty organisations, mostly small ones, in that field.
4. Find a named person at each.
5. Send five emails a day until the list is finished, tracking each one.