The First Internship

Landing an internship is not always easy. My eighth testimony is how God navigated me through the internship process.

The summer after my freshman year I came home to work at the summer job I’d had throughout school and so much drama went down almost everyone quit, myself included. I told my parents I wasn’t coming back the next summer, that I was going to get an internship. When I went back to school I made up a resume—which looked pretty bare considering I was only 19—and attended the career fair. Most people weren’t really paying me any attention, and no one invited me to interview.

About two weeks after the career fair, I found myself taking longer than usual gathering my belongings after class. A person from one of the companies I’d spoken with at the career fair had come to speak. I was getting ready to leave the room, but I felt like I should say something. So, I introduced myself and thanked him for coming to speak. He asked me if I had heard of his company before then, to which I recounted my career fair experience. When he asked why I was looking for an internship so early, I told him I wanted to make sure I’d picked the right major. Seeming to understand where I was coming from, he handed me a business card and told me to send him an email with my resume attached. So I did. Shortly after the Human Resources department called to set up a phone interview.

It was obvious to me that God had given me the feeling to introduce myself for a reason, but I was nervous when I agreed to the phone interview. A phone interview… What was that? God arranged it so that the sorority I was thinking of joining hosted a week of events—all of which I was expected to attend if I wanted to join—the week of my interview. One of these events was with Urban League Professionals, who went over interview skills and in particular phone interviews! This was just in the nick of time for my interview, which went well. Once I went through the complete interview process and landed the job, I found out the speaker from my class was extremely high in the company; he had a lot of influence in the hiring process and had been impressed by my assertiveness.

To be honest, I had no clue what I was doing. I knew the basics: resume, career fair, sound like you learned something in class. I’m not a fan of speaking in class, or when I don’t have to in general, so I knew it wasn’t my voice urging me to speak to him. God guided me to that point, knowing the career fair recruiters weren’t looking at sophomore resumes—they would have never given me an interview—and that the speaker was high enough to get my resume through. As I’ve said throughout the site, God isn’t a magician, He works through people. If I was a biblical writer, this account would go something like “God moved in the speaker’s heart and brought Ree favor in the speaker’s eyes.” Without His guidance in the situation, I never would have gotten my first internship.