For students who do not have a lot of internship or job experience this is a blog post for you! Here are some tips on how to relate some of your extracurricular activities to your internship qualifications during an interview.
For most internships, employers are looking for four qualities in a candidate: teamwork, communication, time management, and efficiency. If you have a leadership position in a club you can easily communicate to your interviewer how being in this position allows you to work with other people and has only strengthened your communication skills. If you have ever helped with an event or program within that organization, you can relay to the employer how each task needed to be completed in a timely and efficient manner in order for the event to run smoothly and effectively.
Be sure to use key words that the employer used in his or her job description to describe your duties within your extracurricular activity.
It is also good to stress that this organization has strengthened a certain quality in you that your employer will see as an asset to their company.
I also make a point to stress to my interviewer that whatever I lack in experience I make up for by learning quickly and facing a task head on.
If you remember to tie your extracurricular experience to those four qualities then you will find that you have a lot to talk about with your interviewer and that you have more experience than you may have previously thought.