An Internship From Your Couch

From the Wall Street Journal | Sept 29 2009

By JONNELLE MARTE

Natalie
Ann Roig completed a marketing internship last spring-while riding the
bus, sitting on her parents' couch and lounging at home in pajamas.

The internship, in which she worked 15 hours a week researching and
blogging about corporate workplace benefits, was virtual-she needed
only a computer and Internet access. Ms. Roig, a senior at the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, never even met her boss, in
Atlanta.

"I didn't have to dress up. I didn't have to sit at a cubicle for
hours," says Ms. Roig, a senior studying graphic design. "It was more
like work at your own pace and get the work done."

Virtual internships, while relatively rare, are becoming more
common, career experts say, fueled by improving technology and the
growth of social media. They are most popular among small to midsize
companies and online businesses. More than one-fourth of 150
internships posted on UrbanInterns.com,
a site that connects small businesses with part-time workers, are
labeled virtual, where the work typically involves researching, sales,
marketing and social-media development.

Josh Anderson for The Wall Street Journa

Natalie Ann Roig worked a virtual marketing internship from various places-even while riding the bus.

"In
the last 10 years they've gone from being almost unheard of to being
something almost every college student has at least considered," says
Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com,
a job board for students and recent graduates. Mr. Rothberg says he
first saw virtual internships in the late 1990s in information
technology and software development-industries, he says, where virtual
internships are still the most common today. Other growth areas include
the sales, marketing and social-media departments of companies across
various industries.

Interns and career counselors say virtual internships can allow
prospective employees to more easily sample a wider variety of jobs,
without having to relocate. "If you're in a place where you don't have
a lot of internship opportunities, all of a sudden the world is open to
you," says Leslie Jensen-Inman, one of Ms. Roig's graphic-design
professors at Tennessee-Chattanooga, who encourages students to seek
virtual internships.

Princess Ojiaku, a graduate student studying biology at North
Carolina Central University, wants to work in science policy. In July,
she began a virtual internship of up to six months with Scientists
& Engineers for America in Washington, D.C. She learned about the
internship on Twitter, where she was following updates for the
nonprofit group, which promotes awareness of science and technology
issues to policy makers.

As part of her internship, Ms. Ojiaku spends 15 minutes to an hour
each night tracking news articles, ads and poll results for this year's
Virginia gubernatorial election, one of the elections the group is
following. She posts updates on the group's Web site, including YouTube
videos, campaign ads and summaries of the candidates' positions on
science-related issues.

Ms. Ojiaku, who is considering being a lawmaker or policy adviser,
says the internship has helped her learn about the legislative process
and key players in Congress, without driving eight hours round-trip to
Washington. "I'm getting an inside view," says the 25-year-old, who
juggles the internship with classes and work as a graduate assistant in
a university lab.

But she acknowledges that the distance limits her view of how policy
making works. Attending committee meetings or observing lawmakers'
daily routines would give her a better sense of what it would be like
to work in Washington, she says.

There are other drawbacks to virtual internships. Working remotely,
virtual interns aren't around other people, making it hard to build
personal rapport or management skills.

"Some people might want to be in an office so that they can feel
like they're in the thick of things," says author Lisa Orrell. She has
hired four virtual interns in the past two years to help maintain her
MySpace and Facebook pages and to promote her book, "Millennials
Incorporated," which advises companies on managing younger workers.

Charlotte Yares

Jed Cohen is on his second virtual internship, which he juggles on top of a full-time job.

As
in traditional internships, interns are supposed to be paid, or receive
school credit for their work, as Ms. Roig did for her virtual marketing
internship. "Labeling something as an internship is not an excuse to
have free labor, so it really has to be for the benefit of the intern,"
says Jay Zweig, an employment attorney in Phoenix.

Career coaches and attorneys say interns, especially those who
aren't paid, should request detailed explanations of the hours and
tasks they will be expected to complete. Interns should also make sure
they will get feedback and mentoring.

Some recent graduates use virtual internships to sample different
fields while holding a full-time job to pay the bills, says Alexia
Vernon, a New York career coach who also advises employers on retaining
younger workers.

Jed Cohen, 21, graduated from New York University in the spring and
works full-time as a customer-service representative for a retailer.
Over the summer, he also worked as a virtual intern for Careerealism.com,
a site aimed at young job seekers, helping founder J.T. O'Donnell
develop ways to use Twitter and other technology to drive more traffic
to the site.

He also proposed a detailed strategy for how Ms. O'Donnell could improve her page on Squidoo.com,
a social-media site. That move impressed Ms. O'Donnell, who says she
will consider hiring Mr. Cohen for a paid position if she has an
opening.

It also helped Mr. Cohen land a second virtual internship with
Squidoo.com this fall. He is one of five interns who are helping
recruit comedians for a charity giveaway, research mothers who blog and
launch a Web site for user-generated quizzes. The interns pick tasks
from a list Squidoo co-founder Megan Casey posts online; she offers
feedback when she can.

"If I can jump in with guidance and motivation and insight along the
way, I do," says Ms. Casey. It "could be at 3 a.m., could be on a
Sunday morning over eggs and coffee."

She and other employers say virtual internships can expand the pool
of candidates and save money on office overhead. "There's just no way I
would have gotten the same level of talent if I required a physical
internship presence" at her office in North Hampton, N.H., says Ms.
O'Donnell.

Still, Mr. Cohen, who works out of Long Island, N.Y., says
communicating electronically with other Squidoo interns as far away as
California and England makes it hard to tell if a colleague likes his
ideas. "You don't have the tone of voice and the body language and
things like that that let you know if you're going too far," he says.

Ms. Roig still blogs occasionally for Miriam Salpeter, the career
coach in Atlanta for whom she was a virtual intern. Ms. Roig says many
graphic-design jobs are virtual, so learning to use blogging software
and improving her writing will help her career. She plans to seek other
virtual internships while in graduate school. "I would definitely love
to continue on the virtual path in my career," she says.

Write to Jonnelle Marte at jonnelle.marte@wsj.com