Students Say Howdy to Internship Study Guides
Scottsdale, AZ (PRWEB) January 08, 2014 -- Everyone knows that a college degree is no longer enough to land students a job. Internships have become a necessity to building a career and are often the conduit between college and job. The growing gap between students’ academic and the workforce is what sparked Howdy’s founders to launch a platform that will aid students in landing more relevant and valuable internships.
“Connecting students to internship opportunities only covers one side of the market,” says Elizabeth Lansdale, co-founder and CEO. The other side involves students applying, interviewing, and accepting internship offers. Students are not able to do this when there isn’t a trusted avenue to read extensive internship reviews, get better prepared for interviews, and determine if an internship would be a good match for them. After declaring a major, students have two summers before graduating, which isn’t a lot of time to decide on a career path. This is why having a summer internship where you gain relevant skills is so important. For this reason, Howdy arms students with in-depth, company specific internship guides, written by past interns.
Howdy’s platform allows past interns to submit internship guides, providing information on a company’s interview process, intern projects, work environment, social life, best places to live, and much more. For instance, a past Atlanta Falcons intern suggests, “be creative and write your resume on a football; that’s what I did and they loved it.” As an incentive, past interns earn credits each time their guide is purchased. The credits earned can then be traded for inside information on another internship. Students can search the internship guides by company name, geographic location, or field of study. Each guide can be previewed before trading in 100 credits ($7.95), or students can purchase credit packages for a reduced price.
Howdy officially launched in November at universities nationwide and to-date already has over 600 registered users. There are currently 200 internship guides published on the site and the selection grows each week. The guides range from fortune 500 companies like Google, to outreach programs like Teach For America, to even smaller companies like New York 1 News. They also provide a free Ernst & Young internship guide as a sample (here http://bit.ly/Ernst_Young_Guide) and an active blog (here http://bit.ly/howdy-blog) to aid students in their pursuit of the perfect internship.
The founders have big plans for Howdy, possibly implementing a “give to get” model, similar to Glassdoor. They are constantly speaking with students, increasing website conversions, and enhancing the internship guides; all to make sure they’re providing a valuable product. Lansdale says, “the minute I think the waters are calm I find something new in the analytics. It’s my fault for always thinking about what’s next, but it really never ends. We must think big everyday.”
The founders started Howdy in 2012 while seniors in the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Arizona. The team won 1st place at the McGuire New Venture Competition & Showcase in April, which sealed the deal for Elizabeth Lansdale, CEO, Jonathan Rave, CFO, and Samuel Zarifi, COO, on launching the startup after graduating. For more information, please visit http://www.howdyon.com.
Elizabeth Lansdale, Howdy, http://www.howdyon.com, +1 (480) 262-0611, [email protected]
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