What Should You Do If You Can’t Get a “Relevant” Internship?

My answer is yes.

And I say this not casually, but as a rather seasoned HR mom who has seen enough cycles of hiring, layoffs, and student expectations rising and crashing back to reality.

The first question we need to rethink is very simple: what does an internship actually mean to you? For many STEM students, going to a hotel and doing what looks like a service role feels unfair. There is often a sense that “this is not what I studied for.” Of course, if before graduation you can land a summer internship at a company like Oracle, that would be ideal. No one is arguing against that. But reality is often less cooperative.

Recently, one of my students from Wellesley College applied for a summer internship at Oracle. She did everything right. Strong background, clear direction. The response she received was simple: due to layoffs, there are no summer internship positions available this year. That was it. So she came back and asked what she should do next. This is not an isolated case. This is the market we are in. Even for strong students from good schools, relevant internships are extremely limited. So instead of insisting on a “perfect match,” we need to step back and redefine the value of an internship in the first place.

In theory, people think there are two paths. One is to go to a smaller tech company. It sounds logical: fewer applicants, maybe more chances. But if you think one step further, smaller companies also have fewer people, fewer roles, and even fewer internship positions. The competition doesn’t disappear; it just becomes less visible. The difficulty is still there. So what is left is the second option, which many people don’t like to hear: take a foundational role, even if it is not directly related to your major. The key is not whether it matches your degree, but whether it gives you something that compounds.

This is where hotels become an interesting and, in my view, underrated choice. Hotels are part of basic life—food, accommodation, travel. Even in a weaker economy, they continue operating. More importantly, they are universally understood. You don’t need to explain what you did in a hotel; people immediately have a picture in their mind. That kind of recognition is more valuable than many students realize. Compared to industries like automotive or certain tech sectors, hotels are also more realistic when it comes to short-term roles. A three-month summer internship is workable for them. In many other industries, it is simply not worth the operational effort, so those positions never exist in the first plac

Another point that I care about a lot is not the job itself, but the environment it puts you in. If you compare a typical retail role with a hotel role, the difference is not about which one is “better,” but about who you are exposed to. In a hotel, you interact with a much wider and often higher-level range of people—guests, business travelers, professionals from different industries, sometimes senior executives. This exposure is not something you can easily get elsewhere at an early stage.

And this leads to what I think is the most underestimated advantage. Working in a hotel forces you to learn how to deal with people. Not in theory, but in real situations, under pressure, and with expectations. You learn how to communicate clearly, how to read people, how to respond when things are not going well, and how to stay professional even when you feel uncomfortable. These are deeply human skills. They are also exactly the kind of skills that AI cannot replace. Students often focus too much on technical alignment and ignore the fact that long-term career growth depends just as much on how you interact with others as on what you know.

So if the perfect internship is available, by all means, take it. But if it is not, waiting endlessly for the “right” opportunity is often a worse decision than taking something that builds real capability. Sometimes the value of an experience is not in how directly it connects to your major, but in how much it shapes the way you think, work, and handle people.

I would still say yes. Not because a hotel internship is perfect, but because in today’s market, it might be one of the more realistic ways to build something that actually lasts.

I’m genuinely curious—if you couldn’t get a perfectly matched internship, would you take something different for the experience, or keep waiting?