Newhouse School of Communications
No More Fetching Coffee
October 10, 2009
by Deaundra Cash
Imagine a website that advertises companies hiring for internships, affordable housing in the area, young, hip hangout spots, and job advice from fellow interns – all free for students. Newhouse senior Chelsea Prince has created a one-stop shop for everything students need regarding finding and keeping a successful internship.
InternCircle is the first networking site that serves as a central clearinghouse for internship recruitment, capable of meeting both students' and employers' needs. Prince, a senior double major in magazine journalism and European history, sees the site as an opportunity to leverage students' experiences and allow them to develop a professional profile.
“InternCirle is a social media site, but it’s not like other sites,” she explained. “It helps students show off their professional image. You can’t do that on Facebook.”
Like most genius ideas, Prince developed the concept of InternCircle from a personal experience. Last summer, Prince was interning for a creative agency in Manhattan, where she was promised pay and hands-on experience with advertising, graphic design and writing. For two-weeks, she says she ended up standing in a janitor’s closet, squinting in the dark,dusty room, arranging colored pencils. After finding a new internship mid-summer for a company
that hadn’t planned on taking on an intern because of a bad experience, Prince quickly realized a disconnection on both ends.
“I wasn’t able to maximize my experience,” she said. “From this internship, I came up with the idea to develop a site that would help people know what they are getting into. Companies also deserve to know what type of students they are hiring.”
InternCircle focuses on the total experience for interns and recruiters. The site has multiple platforms to reach people at whatever level they are in the internship process.
Even though she is at the beginning phases of her idea and just launched the site in August 2009, Prince is already looking to the future and how she can expand InternCircle. “I would like for InternCircle to be the forefront for internships in the media,” she said. “I want to expand the brand with an intern quarterly magazine and I see InternCircle as the central portal for all information regarding internships.”
