CMU School of Drama


Saturday, November 28, 2009

Seeking an Internship? Thought about Twitter?

CollegeSurfing Insider: "The year isn’t over yet, but it’s already time to start thinking about your summer plans. Just the other day, a junior in college was telling me she is looking at internships but hadn’t found many advertised."

4 comments:

Brooke M said...

It seems everyone and everything has a Twitter now. I haven't seen many advertisements lately that don't have a twitter address attached to them. I fully support using the technology that is available in order to find a job or internship position. I'm not sure about twitter, however, simply because it doesn't seem wise to me to use something for a professional means if it is also used socially. It is possible to have multiple twitter accounts, so a professional twitter page does seem like a good idea.

kservice said...

I think that if you get an internship based largely on the fact that you tweeted(???) with your employer, then that may say a lot about how your internship will be dealt with. Twitter is a fairly an informal social-networking tool that has several applications, but it establishes a premise that will affect your internship greatly. Who is to say that your new employer won't be using such tools to gauge your performance at work? Suddenly, your tweets (???) are fair game for evidence of you not doing work during work hours. It's an extreme possibility, but it opens up strange avenues for employer/employee relations that I am not comfortable dealing with.

cmalloy said...

Interesting. I've actually spoken to @internqueen before on Twitter, when I was applying for internships past summer. I've also used Twitter to get in contact with various individuals I had little or no success with over email. (Remember our Dr. Horrible playground production? The legal preliminaries were all arranged on Twitter.) I've gotten myself into trouble multiple times with what I say or post, though; a lot of social media these days seems to be a good fuel for passive-aggressive tendencies. Also, like email, the immediacy of the medium lends itself to reactionary posts that may not reflect the reality of a given situation.

Like all things, be careful with Twitter. I think it's a really interesting combination of social networking, chat room, blog, and messaging service, but I've not yet discovered how to use it for purely productive pursuits.

Addis said...

I admit that I have never even been on Twitter before, let alone tweet. I am a bit confused on how one who go about suddenly making contacts via the internet other than email or facebook (via reconnecting with old friends in the field). Is twitter even a reliable source? If people can stalk twitter for any connection with a possible internship what stops them from simply picking up the phone and call a couple companies to inquire or sell themselves? This generations is something hidding so far behind a computer screen they forget that their are quicker and more personal ways of accomplishing networking.