It’s hard to think about the summer when it’s 23 degrees outside, but students who want to make best use of those months need to be planning for their summer right now.

Internships are the proven pathway to a career. Students can take advantage of the long break during the summer months to gather experience that fills out and enhances a resume. Parents sometimes complain that students are paying tuition money for the privilege of working at non-paying internships, but, from a prepare-for-the-future perspective, there’s no better way to learn about the real world.

It’s hard to think about the summer when it’s 23 degrees outside, but students who want to make best use of those months need to be planning for their summer right now.

Internships are the proven pathway to a career. Students can take advantage of the long break during the summer months to gather experience that fills out and enhances a resume. Parents sometimes complain that students are paying tuition money for the privilege of working at non-paying internships, but, from a prepare-for-the-future perspective, there’s no better way to learn about the real world.

Now’s the time for students to be in gear. As parents, we need to prod our students (especially our sophomores and juniors) during the deep dark days of February to be exploring the possibility of internships through the internship coordinator in their major department and through the Career Center.

Here at Seton Hall, our Career Center helps students write resumes and apply for internships in their major area of study. Seton Hall students can spend the summer learning about media relations at the New York Mets (the Yankees, too, but why would anyone want to do that?) or marketing and sales at Madison Square Garden. Mercedes Benz has an extensive internship program that pays our students a healthy summer wage. Our students leave South Orange in May for diverse fields – working at ABC Radio, ESPN, Fox News, New Jersey law firms, our state court system, pharmaceutical companies, museums, archives and political offices. Eager students can also juggle an internship and course work during the academic year.

Internships are vital for three important reasons: they introduce students to the concept of networking; they confirm students’ career choices; and, most importantly, they bring some students to an epiphany when they have chosen the wrong path. My nephew, for example, started college as a business major. After his first year, he snagged a highly competitive, enviable and well-paying internship in corporate America. After 10 weeks in that environment – at a job he had been eager to do – he went back to college, changed his major to English and began reading literature in earnest. By constrast, one of my daughter’s best friends waited until the summer before her senior year as a finance major to work for a stockbroker. She realized she was in the wrong line of work but it was too late to change her major. She finished out the year, graduated and then applied to graduate school as an education major. The story has a happy ending – she now teaches technology at a local public school.

Thus, the sooner students test the career waters that surround their chosen field of study, the sooner they will get confirmation about whether they have chosen the right path.

Nursing students show up in my office without ever having worked in a hospital. The business of nursing is a far cry from being a regular viewer of House, M.D. or ER. Nursing students need to get their hands dirty a few times in order to appreciate the career they have chosen. Future nurses can work as aides in hospitals during their college years in order to gain experience on the job. That’s an informal approach to an internship.

But students and employers usually prefer to benefit from the formal, credit-carrying approach to internships. Employers know they are getting our best students (most internships require a minimum gpa) who have been in course work to prepare them. Students get to use real-life experience toward the credits needed to graduate.

Students typically sign up for internship credit and have their experience in the work force supervised by both an employer and a professor. In my department, Communication, students are required to submit regular logs of their work experience and to reflect in a summary paper on what they have learned on the job.

Often times, it’s the student who has had the internship who gets the job in the end. All things being equal academically, doesn’t it make sense to choose the student with experience? That’s what happened to me. I had a non-paying internship my last semester senior year at the Associated Press. My boss called me on my graduation day (coincidentally) to offer me a fulltime job.

In the journalism and media fields, it is virtually impossible for a student without internship or employment experience to get a job upon graduation. But the student who does the necessary grunt work during college can be assured of landing an entry level position.

Students who are both confident in their career choice and highly motivated, organized and inquisitive (certainly none of my own children) begin planning their path to the job market when they walk in the door to Seton Hall their freshman year.

We require our first-year students to attend a Career Center workshop; we also mandate that students who are still in search of a major have a one-on-one meeting with a Career Center counselor. This teaches our students about what the Career Center can offer while also helping them craft a resume with a particular job in mind.

But even the less driven students can benefit from a trip to our Career Center or a meeting with the internship coordinator in their department. But time is of the essence. Students who wander in to the Career Center in April looking for a good summer internship are less likely to find anything lucrative or resume-enhancing at that late date. The time to plan for the summer is now.

As parents, we should take the prospect of a student internship as a moment worth nagging about. Instead of complaining about dirty laundry and soda can rings on the furniture, let’s focus on getting our students into the workforce this summer in jobs that will give them a glimmer of their life to come out in the real world!

And heaven help us all!