Internship applications and interviews: what gets read

Quick answer

The CV, the covering note and the interview. What a reader looks for in the first thirty seconds, and the questions you should ask them.

Illustration of stacked books, a folded map with a route and a small aeroplane.

An internship application is read by someone who has twenty others open. What
they are looking for is not evidence that you are good in general, but evidence
that you understand this specific work.

The CV, read as a screening document

Assume thirty seconds. The reader is deciding whether to keep reading, so the
top third has to answer: what can this person do, and have they done it before.

Lead with what you have made, run, written, built or organised. Coursework can
count if you describe what the work was rather than naming the module. A grade is
not an achievement; a project is.

One page unless you have substantial relevant experience. The formatting should
disappear — if the reader notices the design, the design is costing you
attention.

The covering note

Three paragraphs, no more. What the organisation does that you are responding to,
what you have done that is relevant to it, and what you are asking for. Naming a
specific project or piece of their work is the single strongest signal available,
because it proves you looked.

Avoid the adjectives. “Passionate”, “hardworking” and “dedicated” are claims
anyone can make and no reader believes. Replace each with something that happened.

Saying what you cannot do

Do not overstate a skill you will be asked to use on the first day. The
alternative is worse than the gap: an intern who has to be corrected on a basic
tool on day one loses credibility that takes weeks to rebuild.

The safe framing is honest and forward-looking: “I have used this at the level of
coursework and want to work at production standard.” That is a true statement, and
it tells them how to supervise you.

The interview

Most internship interviews are checking three things: whether you can talk about
your own work accurately, whether you understand what the organisation does, and
whether you will be workable to have around.

Prepare to describe one project end to end — what the problem was, what you
decided, why, what happened. That is the answer that distinguishes candidates,
because most describe what they were taught rather than what they chose.

For the “weakness” question, the useful answer is a real limitation with a real
consequence and what you do about it. An invented weakness is detectable and uses
up the one question about self-awareness you will get.

What to ask them

What would a good intern have done by the end of the placement?
Who supervises me, and how often do we meet?
What has a previous intern found hardest?
Is the placement paid, and on what basis?
What happens to the work I produce?

The last two are legitimate questions and are not rude. If asking them changes
the answer, you have learned something important before accepting.

After the interview

A short note the same day: thank them, name one thing you discussed, and say you
would like the placement. No more than four sentences.

Then follow up once, after about ten days. After that, leave it: a persistent
candidate becomes a difficult one, and organisations talk to each other.

Remote and hybrid placements

A remote internship is a real option and a different product. It removes
geography and cost, and it also removes the thing most people want from a
placement: being in a room where the work happens, overhearing how decisions get
made, and being remembered when a job opens.

If you take one, ask how supervision will work in practice — a weekly call, a
defined deliverable, written feedback — because remote placements fail in a
specific way: the intern is given work nobody reviews and learns nothing from it.

If you are rejected

Ask for one sentence of feedback. Roughly half the time you get it, and it is
worth more than another application. The most common reasons are a mismatch of
dates, an application that did not follow the instructions, or a field the
organisation does not cover — all fixable, none visible to you otherwise.

Rejection from a specific organisation is not a judgement about you, and the
organisations that reject people are the same ones that hire them a year later.
Keep the contact.

Preparation that actually shows in the room

Knowing what the organisation actually does, beyond its homepage, is the second. Read a recent piece of its work and be able to say one sentence about it.

What to do if asked about a skill you do not have

Say what level you are at and what you would do to get to the next one. The
version that fails is a vague claim of familiarity; the version that works is
specific: “I have used it for coursework-level analysis, I have not worked with a
production dataset, and I would expect to need supervision for the first week.”

That tells the person hiring how to place you; a vague claim tells them nothing until it is tested.

The place to start is
finding a placement; what
to check before accepting is in
unpaid internships
and the law.

Questions students ask

How long should an internship CV be?

One page unless you have substantial relevant experience. It is read as a screening document in about thirty seconds, so the top third has to show what you can do and what you have already done.

What matters most in a covering note?

Naming something specific the organisation has done and connecting your own work to it. That proves you looked, which is the signal a reader cannot get from an adjective like passionate.

Is it rude to ask whether an internship is paid?

No. Whether the placement is paid and on what basis is a legitimate question, and if asking changes the answer that is worth knowing before you accept.

Common questions