Finding and Landing a Summer Internship

Posted June 7, 2019 by Maria Reilova

I had been worried about finding another job or internship over the summer months since I knew that I was going to be staying in Boston the whole time and did not want to just laze about until my South Korea trip. To be honest I was applying to almost every viable job that was popping up on Jobline. I was lucky enough to be asked to interview for 3 positions at 3 very different libraries. It was a hectic fews weeks in terms of every job I applied for emailing me at the same time, while I was also dealing with my general classes and internship deadlines, in addition to also preparing for a trip home to run the Star Wars 5k at Disney World! It was a lot to handle, but I somehow made it through with only slight strain on my sleep schedule (it is always those 5am flights that are the cheapest unfortunately).

Which leads to my big news, everyone…I scored my first job in a real library! This is huge for me as someone who going into this program has had no professional library experience. I accepted an offer to work as the Research Services Intern at Fidelity Investments over the summer. This is a 12 week paid internship where I will be working full-time (I have to be there at 8 am eep!) in their library, helping the asset management team with their research requests.

I am both so nervous and so excited about this position. Since going through the program, my mind has really opened up to career options I had not previously considered. If you had asked me before I started the program if I was interested in corporate librarianship, I probably would have responded with “what type of what now???” Luckily, last semester in my LIS407 course we had a whole class devoted to different libraries such as law, medical, and business. Linda Schuller, our liaison librarian at Beatley and instructor for the LIS430 – Business Sources and Services course, visited to instruct on this topic and my interest was peaked! It also turns out that an alumni of the program who I met at one of the admissions office information events had this internship when she was at SLIS (she was amazing to answer all my questions about the internship and let me name drop her during my interview)!

I am so beyond excited to start this internship in June and will certainly follow-up with a future blog post! My advice for anyone going through something similar is to keep an open mind about what type of job or internship you are looking for. Every opportunity is a chance to either practice your interview skills, learn and talk with current professionals and start establishing those networking relationships, and lastly, potentially discovering a whole new side to libraries that you didn’t even know you were interested in!