Internships are a great way to apply the skills you’re learning in j-school and combine them with real-world experience. Also, clips! Nothing helps a portfolio like a solid set of varied clips, and nothing helps a set of clips like an internship. Unfortunately, many students wait too long to start looking for an internship, especially if they’re interested in getting one of the “big” ones.

Photo Credit: Leeni!, Flickr.

If you want to aim for one of the “big” internships — The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund — you need to start preparing almost a year in advance. The more time you have, the better prepared you’ll be and the easier it’ll be to supplement your application if you think you need additional materials or clips. Those three internships, for example, have deadlines for their summer internships around November 1. That’s roughly nine months between when your application is due and when the internship starts.

If you start searching early, you can also use the opportunity to create material specifically for your application that covers any weak areas you may have. For example, I decided I wanted to apply to the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, and the application was due near the end of March. Because I made the decision to apply in January, I was able to publish two front-page reporting pieces in my college newspaper, since all of my other published clips were opinion columns, and all my reporting work was for classes and thus hadn’t been printed.

Similarly, you can use the time before an internship application is due to round out your portfolio and diversify your skill set. Make a Soundslides presentation, or an audio reporting story for radio or podcast, or doing an investigative or data-driven CAR piece that will testify to your database skills.

Make sure you give yourself a week or two (at least) to polish your application up. It should go without saying that it should be completely free of grammatical and spelling errors, that you should spend a significant amount of time crafting an entertaining and entriguing cover letter, and that you should follow all the applications’ directions exactly. I recommend you sit down with an advisor or mentor to go over your clips and decide which are the strongest and how many to submit — it’s pretty rare for you to want to sumbit the maximum number of pieces allowed or all of your published work. For example, I have more than 60 pieces published in The Daily Aztec, but when I applied to an internship that asked for “no more than 20 pieces of puublished work,” I only submitted 17 clips, and I probably could have sent much less. It’s best to select a sample of your best work that reflects your range, and professors, adacedmic advisors and mentors will be better able to judge that.

Between the week or two of application polishing and the extra month or two to prepare additional material, and the actual span of time between the internship application itself, you should start preparing roughly one year before you plan to actually intern. If it’s a summer internship, you should decide to apply by September, because those applications are usually due in November. Fall internships should usually be decided by December or January, and Spring by late summer.

Planning is everything!