Dive into your internship search as soon as possible

It pays to be prepared.\nBetween the kindergarten count-a-thon and nap time, I must have missed that lesson. \nI am the chronic king of procrastination. Any task with the slightest tinge of mediocrity gets pushed back in the datebook until I absolutely must force myself to do it. Unfortunately, this includes most classwork and other annoying, banal things that get in the way of a fun day in Bloomington. \nAlong with tedious tasks, large arduous chores like scrubbing the kitchen floor lie fairly low on my to-do list. With this mentality firmly in place, I began to think about applying for internships my sophomore year. \nI was in class doing the usual: staring off into space and pondering what to do next summer. It was my third semester, and graduation was still a lifetime away. Finding an internship sounded like too much work. After all, I had two more years for that.\nAnd anyway, most internships require the applicant to be a junior or senior. This included the flier I scrounged up off the classroom floor. The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund sponsored editing internships at organizations all over the country. It sounded interesting, but not only was it for upperclassmen, the program assigned interns to metro newspapers, including The New York Times. I had absolutely no chance of jumping from a summer at the Burger King drive-thru to the pinnacle of the journalistic world.\nAdding to the difficulty, I hadn't the slightest idea of what to do to apply. References? I didn't have one, let alone three. Resume? Nope. Work samples? Besides those stacks of W170 compositions, hardly. \nOn top of that there was a one-hour skill test and a two-page biographical essay, and everything had to be bundled in a handy manila envelope and mailed in two or three weeks.\nWhy did I even bother? All that work would make even the most dedicated procrastinators cringe. But I was a sophomore who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. I wanted to learn something tangible -- beyond the daily snore-inducing lecture. I wanted to know if this line of work was for me, before I graduated with a diploma in my hands. \nSo I went against every natural instinct and applied.\nI relied on the simple elegance of Microsoft Word's Resume Wizard to build a resume. I begged and pleaded professors whose names I could barely remember to write something nice about my editing skills. I combed through archaic papers on my hard drive -- anything that could pass as journalism. Relying on my "junior-by-credit-hour status," I hurried and barely got everything in on time.\nWeeks passed. The notification deadline passed.\nFigures. I knew that was a waste of time. Think how many hours I could have been sleeping.\nThen, one week before semester break, the planets aligned, the Earth shook, and I received a phone call offering me a spot in next summer's internship program. And the rest, as they say, is history.\nSo as the crunch of midterms approaches, keep internship possibilities in mind. It's never too early to start looking. When you intern early, you can determine before you graduate whether the career of your dreams has become a nightmarish death sentence. There's also the domino effect: An early internship also gives you a leg-up on everyone else who starts later and increases your chance of getting a better internship and post-graduation job down the road.\nBug your school's placement offices now. Scour the bulletins and newsletters. Bend over backward to get applications in on time.\nAnd don't be daunted by programs that seem impenetrable … you might just be surprised by what phone call you get.