Internship Survey Highlights

As you may be aware, we recently launched the 2017 edition of our top internship rankings—the culmination of a great deal of effort by many here at Vault, and also the companies we survey, who give us an unprecedented level of access to their employees every year and, without whom, the rankings would not be possible.

Now that the hard work is out of the way, we wanted to take a moment to share some information and interesting data points from our survey that don't make it into the rankings, but which play a crucial role in understanding exactly what it is the rankings are all about.

First, and most pertinent, is that question of access: unlike some of our competitors, we work directly with firms to ensure that we're reaching only verified, current interns—and this year more than 11,600 of them shared their thoughts and opinions about their internships with us.

Here are some of the more interesting insights they gave us:

98% of internships were paid

Due to the range of industries and companies covered in the survey, it's no surprise to find that pay varies vary widely across our response set: it includes hourly wages ranging from $10 to $40, all the way up to monthly salaries in excess of $5,000, to sums pro-rated based on annual salaries of $70K+.

Freshman year is about partying?

Two-thirds of our respondents interned as juniors or seniors in college. To be honest, we're not sure what that says about freshmen and sophomores: maybe they're too busy getting to grips with academics and the logistics of figuring out where the dining hall is. Maybe they're having too much fun. Or maybe companies don't want them until after the loan repayment nightmares have started kicking in (somewhere towards the end of sophomore year, in our experience).

More than half of internships resulted in full-time job offers

Decision factors

Pay and location are the two most common factors cited by interns, closely followed by issues related to career advancement and full-time opportunities.

Phones for fun, computers for work

Ditch that picture you've got of millennials as consummate multi-taskers doing everything on the fly: when it comes to researching internships, 95% of respondents told us that their primary tool is a laptop. Smartphones aren't completely out of the picture, though: 28% of interns relied on those at some point during the search as well.

And it's not just technology where tried and trusted methods are beating out new-fangled tech: fully two-thirds of respondents told us that campus recruiting was the best way to learn about internships.