How to Find an Internship

Maliya Baxter is a rising senior at Towson University located in Towson, MD. She is currently a DevOps Engineering intern at PayPal and works alongside the DataOps team for the PayPal Xoom platform. Here she shares her tips on how to find an internship:  

• Connect with people with similar interests: A great place to start searching for internships is to connect with local communities or organizations around you. If you are currently a student, you can join student organizations that relate to your career goals. Universities usually have hundreds of clubs for all majors and interests. Join your school’s software engineering, women in tech, or marketing clubs. You can also look into joining Discord or Slack channels with many members sharing job opportunities and interview advice, and you may even connect with a potential mentor through these channels! 
• Build your network using LinkedIn: If you don’t have a LinkedIn create an account ASAP! Here you can build your profile to get job alerts for your field and location and most importantly directly connect with people that work for the companies you’re interested in! On LinkedIn, you can search for and reach out to recruiters from companies and ask them for advice and recommendations to help you land a role with your desired company. But personally, I think it’s even better to connect with alum from your university who work at your desired company to give you more information about their personal experience as an employee/intern, and how they landed the role. 
• Express your interest to your peers: Word of mouth works just as well too. If you express that you are actively looking or interested in an internship opportunity to those who are close to you, I’m sure they would be more than happy to assist you with your search! You can attend a professor’s office hours or set up a meeting with a mentor and ask if they know of an internship or research opportunity. Family members are always good to ask too. Connect with a family member that currently works in the field you’re interested in and ask them for advice. Even if these people don’t have opportunities for you immediately hopefully, they’ll keep a lookout for you and may become sponsors for you in the future. 

When you join PayPal for an internship, you will work on real, meaningful projects that directly support PayPal’s business and customers, meet with peers and leaders, and build a strong network and community. Check out our open opportunities for interns here.