To get a decent job after graduation, it's common knowledge that you intern for at
least a summer, stuffing envelopes and fetching coffee. After that, you're qualified to
spend a couple of years chained to the Xerox machine or some other instrument of entry-level
torture.
The fledgling Internet industry works slightly differently. Just ask Eric Umansky.
Two years ago, Umansky graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in
comparative literature, moved to San Francisco, and took an internship at MoJo Wire, the
online version of Mother Jones magazine. Today, he's the editor of MoJo Wire, second only
to the publisher. As editor, Umansky oversees MoJo Wire's editorial content and a six-figure
budget as well as three employees and three interns. Not bad, considering that most of
Umansky's Penn classmates in other industries are only now likely to be rising above entry-level
ennui.
Umansky was not the only newly minted liberal-arts graduate recruited by the Web industry.
All kinds of Internet companies are beside themselves trying to accommodate the public's
insatiable demand for Internet products and services and are looking to college students for help.
Not only are internships in the industry plentiful, but they also often involve more interesting,
substantial tasks than finding the manila envelopes in the supply cabinet. And, as in
Umansky's case, Web internships may propel young people to where they want to be much faster
than traditional internships. Although engineering and computer-science majors are the obvious
beneficiaries of the Internet boom, liberal-arts and business majors can also find places for
themselves in the technology economy.
"One hundred and fifty years ago, people said, 'Go west, young man,' because the West was
growing," says Wade Lagrone, a first-year MBA student at the J. L. Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University and an intern at Yahoo! Inc., the firm behind the leading navigational
guide on the Web. "Today, it's the Internet. It's a smart move to start working in a growing
industry."
Finding a Web internship can be as easy as surfing the Net in search of places you'd like to
work. Larger companies, like Internet-software provider Netscape Communications Corporation,
often offer formal internship programs, with opportunities posted online. But most companies
are caught up in the paradoxical situation of being so strapped for time and resources that they
don't have the wherewithal to reach out for help. The trick is to find contact information on
the company's Web site and make a cold call volunteering your services rather than wait for a
position to be advertised.
That's exactly what Lagrone did when he applied for his Yahoo! internship. While his peers
were vying for the same old jobs in traditional companies, Lagrone approached Yahoo!'s marketing
department and offered his time and business knowledge in exchange for the chance to gain exposure
to an industry in which he hopes to settle after he graduates.
"The director's position was, 'You're here, you're in our laps, let's do it,'" recalls
Lagrone.
Lagrone, with some graduate-school and professional experience behind him, probably had an
easier time than an undergrad would have had in convincing Yahoo! to take him on. As a
brand-marketing intern, Lagrone promotes Yahoo! by doing co-marketing and promotional
deals with other companies; such work generally requires an understanding of business
and contracts that would be difficult to teach someone over the course of a three-month
internship. But that doesn't mean undergrads shouldn't at least try, especially if
they've taken a few business courses, says Lagrone. In times of frantic growth, companies
aren't likely to refuse help, wherever it comes from.
And while age and experience sometimes factor into whether you'll get business-related
internships, youth is often a greater asset than experience in the technology field.
Young people are especially in demand because they're generally more familiar with the
latest technologies-college students have access through their campuses to computers that
often befuddle people who've been in the working world for a while.
"There's just a general understanding that in many respects, technology renders experience
obsolete after a year," says Mary Hamershock, the manager of recruiting for Netscape. "So
in a quickly growing company like Netscape, you want to bring in really smart people, and you
find them at colleges."
Some of these "smart" college kids can be more influential at Internet companies than their
counterparts at the offices of Paine Webber. Ross Fubini, a Carnegie Mellon senior who's one
of Netscape's 106 summer interns, can boast that every time someone uses a Netscape browser
to visit a Web site, they're relying on a bit of code he wrote--that's at least seventy million
people who are impacted by his summer job. "This is not atypical," says Fubini. "Other interns
around me are having equal input."
It's not just HTML whizzes that get to cash in. Even those without a lot Internet experience can
learn the technical skills needed for a high-paying technical Web internship. Lee Weiner, for
instance, is an entirely self-taught techie. A 1996 communications graduate of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, Weiner took a few computer classes during his junior year and
created his own Web site. With only the experience of his homegrown homepage, Weiner managed
to convince a local radio station to let him develop its Web site. Although he got paid
practically nothing for that, the experience landed him an internship as a Web developer at
CIO Communications, publisher of WebMaster and CIO magazines, the summer after he graduated.
"My boss actually liked that I wasn't a computer-science major," says Weiner. "Even though my job
is about technology, he didn't want somebody who was ultra-techie, who couldn't write or communicate
well."
Weiner wound up being hired as full-time employee, making significantly more money than his fellow
communications majors at UMass.
While Net internships potentially offer greater rewards than internships in other industries,
there's one way in which they're similar to any kind of internship: they tend not to pay so well.
MoJo Wire, for instance, pays its interns only a $100 travel stipend per month for the first four
months of the year-long program. For the remaining eight months of the fellowship, interns make
$800 a month.
On the other hand, a summer of poverty at a Web site scanning documents might be the first phase
of a high-powered career amidst the digerati. MoJo Wire's former interns all scored full-time
jobs at prestigious print and Web publications.
