How do you find an internship abroad?

Find out what your interests are

It is important to think carefully about what kind of internship you are looking for. First, check what your interests are and what goals you set for your career so that you know what you want to achieve and what you want to learn from the internship. In addition, it is good to look at which countries you could and want to go. For some countries you will need a visa or the average cost of living is very high. So be honest with yourself and make a list of the top 3 countries you would like to go to.

Find a work placement yourself

It is undoubtedly a huge amount of work to find an internship abroad yourself. It requires a lot of perseverance and optimism since you will often get no response at all. It often happens that you will need to send out 40 internship applications before you find an internship abroad that fits your needs. 

Normally you send the internship company an email and then you wait until you get a response. What we would recommend is to call the company to ask if they are looking for interns. If they say no then you can put the focus elsewhere and if they say yes they will often ask you to send an email with your resume and motivation letter. This saves you time and ensures that you are better informed about the company.

If you want to approach a larger company, it will be more difficult to obtain the phone number of the HR department, but these companies probably have a sound application procedure on the ‘career’ page of their website.

What can also help you in the right direction is to inform your friends, family and anyone else who is a relevant contact person. Maybe they work for a company that also has an office abroad or they know someone who has recently found an internship abroad. In addition, you can notify your network on LinkedIn or use the search function to find a suitable internship. After all, this is a big part of the platform.

Use internship intermediaries

In addition to being able to approach a company directly, there are also intermediaries who help you find an internship abroad. This often works easily and saves you some time. There is however a disadvantage. It costs a lot of money. On average, an internship intermediary will easily cost you 800 euros, half of which will be asked as a deposit in advance. The company then looks for an internship that suits your needs and if they have found something you will need to pay the second half. It is a lot of money that you can better spend on the flight or for activities in the foreign country itself.

If you’re looking for an internship intermediary in Latin America to find your internship then we can recommend you to go to pic-management. They have proven to be a successful company and a favorite of the students.

Find an internship for free through Tellanto

Because it is an internship, students often work for no or a small salary while they still bring many new ideas and deliver surprisingly good work. Tellanto is an initiative to help students find an internship in Latin America without asking money. We aim to help students with the most incredible time of their live. That’s what it’s all about at Tellanto. We go against the traditional intermediaries and make an internship possible abroad for everyone, so also for you! Screw expensive intermediaries!