International students face unique challenges in finding summer internships

In searching for summer internships in the United States, international students face a number of barriers that domestic students don’t have to worry about.

According to a report by Career Services, just over half of international students in the College of Arts and Sciences had summer internships in the United States in 2014, versus 49 percent that reported having internships outside the U.S. 85 percent of U.S. internships taken by College international students were located on the East coast, especially in New York and Pennsylvania. Outside the U.S., just over half of all international internships were located in Asia, with India and China ranking at the top of the list.

Engineering junior Amilcar Cipriano, an international student from Mozambique, struggled to find an internship in the U.S. during his first two years of college.

“It’s more difficult to find internships in the U.S., specifically engineering internships,” he said. “A lot of the [engineering] companies doing really cool things are working under government funding, and they can’t hire international kids. If you appear international, then you just don’t have a chance.”

Due to the scarcity of mechanical engineering internships for international students in the U.S., Cipriano ended up spending his past two summers abroad. This summer, he finally managed to secure a paid job working at Penn’s mechanical engineering machine shop.

While Cipriano noted that his employers “were almost unwilling to hire me because I’m international,” he said he still thought there were certain advantages to being an international student.

“I think it’s very useful to be an international student, to travel abroad and experience something else,” he said. “It broadens your mind and makes you think differently. I think it’s important to have more than just the views you’ve grown up with.”

For Engineering freshman Karishma Nanwani, it was a lot easier to find an internship back home in Indonesia than in the U.S. due to family connections.

Nanwani had originally applied to internships in the U.S., but decided last minute that she wanted to spend the summer back home instead to be around family. She called her parents to inform them of her decision and secured an internship at Johnson & Johnson in Jakarta within a week.

“My family has lived [in Indonesia] for a really long time, so by now my parents have a lot of connections,” she said. “My dad is good friends with the CEO of Johnson & Johnson in Indonesia, so all he had to do was talk to his friend, and his friend was like, ‘Yeah, send me her resume and I can just put it on the top of the pile at HR.’”

Nanwani noted that her lack of connections was the main thing that made it harder for her to find an internship in the U.S. versus at home, rather than her status as an international student.

“It’s just the fact that I’m not from here and I don’t have anyone that I know, so getting an internship [in the U.S.] would be a lot harder because there’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just in the pool of applicants with everyone else.”

College and Wharton sophomore Stephen Cho said that getting internships in the U.S. was “a little more difficult, but still possible” as an international student from Canada.

“I definitely think it’s a little bit harder to find opportunities in the U.S,” Cho said. “There’s more checkpoints for you and your employer, so that complicates things. But I don’t think it’s prohibitive by any means.”

Cho didn’t experience any difficulties landing an internship this summer at a health care equity firm in New York City due to his F1 student visa, which gave him legal authorization to work in the U.S. Finding this internship in the U.S., he said, was an important step in his career given his future ambitions to settle in U.S.

“In terms of wanting to have my career and my life here, I thought it was really important for me to start having work experience in the U.S.,” Cho said. “That’s why I looked exclusively in the U.S. [for internships this summer].”

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