Student Jobs: How to Find Internships, Part-Time, and New-Grad Roles
"Student jobs" covers three pretty different things: part-time work during school, internships during summer and the academic year, and full-time roles you start after you graduate. Each has its own playbook, its own timeline, and its own application volume. Here's the breakdown.
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The three categories of student jobs
1. Part-time and on-campus work
This is the "make rent while in school" category: tutoring, research assistant, library desk, food service, retail. The best places to find these are your university's job board (often Handshake) and the bulletin boards inside your department. Application volume is low (you'll send maybe 5 to 20), turnaround is fast, and the bar is "available when we need you."
2. Internships
This is the high-volume, high-stakes category for CS and adjacent majors. Summer internships are recruited 6 to 12 months ahead of the start date, the best roles fill before December, and a competitive search means 100 to 250 applications across the season. The deep guide is in our internships hub.
3. New-grad full-time roles
Recruited for in the fall of senior year (for big-name tech) or rolling throughout the year (for smaller companies). The cycle overlaps with internship recruiting, which means seniors are often interviewing for both at once. Application volume is similar to internships: 80 to 200 over a search.
Where students actually find these roles
- Handshake. If your university uses it, this is the highest-conversion-rate platform for student-targeted roles because employers are recruiting your school specifically.
- The SimplifyJobs GitHub list. For tech internships, the best free resource on the internet. Star and check weekly.
- LinkedIn. Required, even if you don't love it. Most company recruiters source candidates here for new-grad and internship roles alike.
- RippleMatch. Algorithmic matching for early-career roles, lower volume but more targeted.
- Company university-relations pages. For your top 3-5 dream companies, find their specific student-recruiting page. Often has early access to roles not posted on the main careers site.
- Your school's career office. Underused. They often have employer relationships you can't access otherwise.
The application-volume problem
Internship and new-grad applications stack up fast. A typical CS student in active search mode is sending 5 to 15 applications per week from October through February, then trying to keep momentum into the spring. Each application form takes 5 to 10 minutes to fill manually. Do the math: at 10 applications a week, that's an hour to two hours just typing your name, address, work history, and "Why this role?" into Workday over and over.
Lentra fills the form in about 20 seconds. Upload your resume once, click the icon on any application page, and the form is done. Free. No quotas. No paid tier. Built for exactly the volume problem student-job-hunting creates.
Install Lentra Free, takes one minute.