Summer Internship Funding

To be eligible to apply, students must:

• Be currently matriculated and in good academic standing
• Plan to enroll at Colgate for at least one additional semester
• Have a résumé certified by Career Services this academic year

And their summer experience must meet the following criteria to be considered:

• Students must work for a minimum of eight weeks full-time (at least 35 hours per week), or the equivalent. Exceptions to this 280-hour minimum will be considered only for significant commitments, such as academic or military service conflicts.
• The proposed opportunity(/ies) must be experientially-based. If a student chooses to combine an internship, research project, or service project with a training course, the experiential component must comprise at least 200 of the required hours.
• Total eligible allocations for living costs (per Career Services Summer Internship Funding budget worksheet) must outweigh the total compensation earned from the proposed experience. Students who will earn more than their living cost allocations are not eligible for a grant.
• The experience must be located in the student’s home country, the United States, or a location that aligns with Colgate’s current travel policy. Please see the FAQ below on international sites and the requirements for minimum time spent in-country.
• A site must extend an offer for a student to join the experience no later than June 1, 2025. All paperwork must be submitted by this date.

Knowing that unpaid/underpaid experiences may be hard to financially access for many of our community, all students who meet the criteria above can apply, regardless of whether they receive Colgate financial aid. Financial aid status may influence which sources of funding a student is eligible to receive. Many of this program’s funding sources are dedicated to supporting our highest-need students.

1. Be sure your resume is certified for this academic year. If not, schedule an appointment with an adviser as soon as possible.
2. Begin to think through what kinds of opportunities would meet your career development needs. Are you exploring options or trying to deepen your experience? A conversation with a career adviser can support either starting point, as well as your ongoing search.
3. Ensure you are applying to the correct source of career development funding that is best suited to your proposed experience. If you are not sure, ask a staff member in Career Services.
4. Download a copy of the application questions. Begin to brainstorm your responses.
5. Attend a Summer Internship Funding Strategy Session to workshop with an adviser and your peers on what makes a great response to the application questions. Register on Handshake.
6. Work on your application offline and thoroughly proofread it before transferring your responses to the online form. Each application question provides the committee insight into your thought process. Take the opportunity to fully answer each question with a thoughtful response. Career advisers can assist with this process.

Applications are reviewed by a committee of Colgate faculty, staff, and alumni. Funding will be awarded to the highest-scoring applicants until resources are exhausted.

The Summer Internship Funding committee will evaluate applications on the following criteria:

• Intentionality: The applicant shows evidence of thought around what they are searching for and how criteria for the summer experience have been determined.
• Clarity of learning objectives: The applicant clearly defines and articulates potential takeaways from the proposed summer experience(s).
• Compelling articulation of why: The applicant provides a compelling rationale as to why these types of experiences would be critical to exploring or pursuing an identified career interest.
• Relevance of experience: If the applicant proposes an experience that is exploratory in nature, the applicant provides evidence to explain why the proposed experience(s) allow exploration and reflection on these areas of interest. Alternatively, if the applicant is searching for an experience that is purposeful with regard to identified career goals, the applicant provides evidence for how proposed experiences are relevant to the student's future goals.
• Familiarization and maturity: The applicant demonstrates evidence of research and understanding of industry-based, organizational, geographic, and cultural dynamics of the proposed experience.

Experiential learning opportunities, such as internships, research, or long-term volunteer opportunities provide a student the opportunity to ultimately contribute work alongside industry colleagues in a professional environment. The setting could either be in-person or remote. These roles are intended to help students gain first-hand experience, build skills through using them, test out different work environments, and grow their professional networks.

These opportunities differ from training programs, courses, or credentialing programs, whose primary objective is learning a skill through classroom instruction, with, at times, applied components. Students seeking funding to participate in CNA, STNA, EMT, or phlebotomy training; business courses; design courses; language programs; field school; coding boot camps, or the like should apply for funding support through the Career Services Microcredential Initiative summer cohort.  

Students should consult with a career adviser if they are unsure if their proposed experience fits within the Summer Internship Funding or the Microcredentials Initiative.

No. At the point of application, you may already have accepted an offer or still be in the process of applying. We recognize that the outcome of this grant process may impact which experiences are accessible. All applications are scored with the same criteria regardless of whether a student has accepted an offer. Students will have until June 1 to accept an offer and complete all grant paperwork.

International experiential opportunities can be valuable. For the purpose of Summer Internship Funding, “international destinations” are defined as travel to a location outside a student’s home country or the United States. Any location within a student’s home country is considered a “domestic” experience and will reflect the maximum grant amount for domestic experiences ($5,100).

Students may receive funding to participate in an international opportunity, as defined above, as long as it meets the following criteria:

• At least five of the required eight weeks of the experience must be in the proposed international location. Short-term travel is disproportionately expensive and is not the best use of Colgate’s resources.
• Locations must be deemed to be at a reasonable level of risk. No grant funding will be approved for locations for which a U.S. Department of State level 4 travel advisory is in effect during any stage of this process. Level 3 destinations that reflect considerable health or safety concerns will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Students are encouraged to research travel advisories on the U.S. Department of State website and discuss plans with Career Services before requesting funding or accepting an experience. As conditions can change quickly, students are also highly encouraged to consider a domestic backup plan.

Unpaid experiences do not offer any form of compensation. Underpaid experiences provide some compensation (i.e., a stipend, metro pass, or hourly wage), however, it is insufficient to cover a student’s maximum allocation for each category of living expenses within the Summer Internship Funding budget sheet.

Only expenses incurred while students are engaged in their summer experience are eligible for consideration. These grants cannot offer funding for lost wages or the cost of academic year expenses.

Once you are offered a Summer Internship Grant, you will attend a mandatory budgeting workshop and submit a budget proposal using our form. Grant amounts will reflect the specific circumstances of your summer experience, such as its duration, location, etc.

Awards will be calculated using this equation: Total cost of living expenses (up to the maximum amount per expense category) minus a student’s total compensation.

Maximum awards for summer 2025 will be $5,100 for domestic experiences and  $6,100 for international experiences. Maximum awards will only be offered when the student’s budget calculation warrants it.

Note: Summer Internship Funding is designed to make an experience more accessible, not to meet all financial needs or desires of applicants. It is highly unlikely that a student’s grant will fully cover all of the expenses of living in a high-cost metro area. Students will need to employ a variety of cost reduction strategies — such as sharing spaces with roommates, cooking on a budget, using public transportation — or consider lower-cost opportunities.

You are welcome to apply to either or both programs. Your proposed experience for each application will need to be distinctly different from the other, as it must fit the criteria of that initiative. Otherwise said, you cannot apply to both initiatives with the same proposal.

The single exception to this policy is in cases where students intend to combine an experiential opportunity with a training program to create a full Summer Internship Funding proposal. In these instances, the experiential component of the combined set of opportunities must compose at least 200 hours of the 280 minimum.

If you are fortunate to receive both offers, you must choose between the two. Students will learn the outcomes of both processes before needing to respond to either offer.

Each program has a distinct timeline, different maximum awards, and different expenses that qualify for funding support. Please talk with the team in Career Services to determine which option is better suited to your career development goals.

To make funding accessible to as many students as possible, students may only access one full-time funding offer per summer. Students who have committed to receiving funding from the Lampert Institute, Upstate Institute, student- or faculty-initiated summer research, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Colgate summer employment, or Career Services Microcredentials program must withdraw their funding application for Summer Internship Funding. Likewise, students who commit to accessing Career Services funding should withdraw from other on-campus funding application processes.

Students may request up to $1,500 to cover program fees associated with using a placement agency or third party vendor to secure a summer experience, if their budget has space (up to the maximum allocation) after calculating related living expenses. For most pay-to-participate experiential programs, the fees widely outweigh our available funding. Students will need to be realistic about whether these experiences are affordable to them.

Students will receive notification of decisions in early April. Initial offers are conditional upon the student securing a summer experience that aligns with the goals laid out in their funding application, attending a mandatory budget workshop, and submitting a budget request. A final grant offer will be verified shortly after a student submits their paperwork; disbursements will follow within two weeks. This will need to occur no later than June 1, 2025.

Unfortunately, we cannot notify grantees of their status before early April. If you are asked to commit to accepting an experience before this time frame, you should consider whether this is an experience you can afford in the event that you do not receive funding. With respectful communication, your employer may also be willing to extend the time frame by which you need to respond to your offer. Please connect with our advisers to discuss how to approach this negotiation.