The next internship frontier

James Critelli knew only five words of Mandarin, but he didn’t let that stop him from applying last year for a summer internship in China, writes Alison Damast for Bloomberg Businessweek. Critelli, now a junior at Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, was placed last summer with an investment bank and energy think-tank in Shanghai through CRCC Asia, a company that specialises in placing college students and recent graduates with internships in China. For Critelli, the experience was well worth the nearly $4,000 price tag the company charged for the two-month experience.

Critelli is part of a new wave of undergraduate students, many of them business majors, who are heading to Shanghai, Beijing and other Chinese cities to get international work experience in the world’s second-biggest economy, bolstering their résumés in a still-tough job market for college graduates.

In the 2009-10 academic year, the latest for which data are available, 20,000 students received academic credit at US colleges and universities for internships or work abroad, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2009-10 Open Doors report. Many of these students have interned in such countries as Israel, the UK, and Germany; lately, an increasing number seek positions in China, say several internship providers.
Full report on the Bloomberg Businessweek site