Natalie Ann Roig completed a marketing internship last spring—while riding the bus, sitting on her parents' couch and lounging at home in pajamas.
The internship, in which she worked 15 hours a week researching and blogging about corporate workplace benefits, was virtual—she needed only a computer and Internet access. Ms. Roig, a senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, never even met her boss, in Atlanta.
"I didn't have to dress up. I didn't have to sit at a cubicle for hours," says Ms. Roig, a senior studying graphic design. "It was more like work at your own pace and get the work done."
Virtual internships, while relatively rare, are becoming more common, career experts say, fueled by improving technology and the growth of social media. They are most popular among small to midsize companies and online businesses. More than one-fourth of 150 internships posted on UrbanInterns.com, a site that connects small businesses with part-time workers, are labeled virtual, where the work typically involves researching, sales, marketing and social-media development.
"In the last 10 years they've gone from being almost unheard of to being something almost every college student has at least considered," says Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, a job board for students and recent graduates. Mr. Rothberg says he first saw virtual internships in the late 1990s in information technology and software development—industries, he says, where virtual internships are still the most common today. Other growth areas include the sales, marketing and social-media departments of companies across various industries.
Interns and career counselors say virtual internships can allow prospective employees to more easily sample a wider variety of jobs, without having to relocate. "If you're in a place where you don't have a lot of internship opportunities, all of a sudden the world is open to you," says Leslie Jensen-Inman, one of Ms. Roig's graphic-design professors at Tennessee-Chattanooga, who encourages students to seek virtual internships.
Princess Ojiaku, a graduate student studying biology at North Carolina Central University, wants to work in science policy. In July, she began a virtual internship of up to six months with Scientists & Engineers for America in Washington, D.C. She learned about the internship on Twitter, where she was following updates for the nonprofit group, which promotes awareness of science and technology issues to policy makers.
As part of her internship, Ms. Ojiaku spends 15 minutes to an hour each night tracking news articles, ads and poll results for this year's Virginia gubernatorial election, one of the elections the group is following. She posts updates on the group's Web site, including YouTube videos, campaign ads and summaries of the candidates' positions on science-related issues.
Ms. Ojiaku, who is considering being a lawmaker or policy adviser, says the internship has helped her learn about the legislative process and key players in Congress, without driving eight hours round-trip to Washington. "I'm getting an inside view," says the 25-year-old, who juggles the internship with classes and work as a graduate assistant in a university lab.
But she acknowledges that the distance limits her view of how policy making works. Attending committee meetings or observing lawmakers' daily routines would give her a better sense of what it would be like to work in Washington, she says.
There are other drawbacks to virtual internships. Working remotely, virtual interns aren't around other people, making it hard to build personal rapport or management skills.
"Some people might want to be in an office so that they can feel like they're in the thick of things," says author Lisa Orrell. She has hired four virtual interns in the past two years to help maintain her MySpace and Facebook pages and to promote her book, "Millennials Incorporated," which advises companies on managing younger workers.
As in traditional internships, interns are supposed to be paid, or receive school credit for their work, as Ms. Roig did for her virtual marketing internship. "Labeling something as an internship is not an excuse to have free labor, so it really has to be for the benefit of the intern," says Jay Zweig, an employment attorney in Phoenix.
Career coaches and attorneys say interns, especially those who aren't paid, should request detailed explanations of the hours and tasks they will be expected to complete. Interns should also make sure they will get feedback and mentoring.
Some recent graduates use virtual internships to sample different fields while holding a full-time job to pay the bills, says Alexia Vernon, a New York career coach who also advises employers on retaining younger workers.
Jed Cohen, 21, graduated from New York University in the spring and works full-time as a customer-service representative for a retailer. Over the summer, he also worked as a virtual intern for Careerealism.com, a site aimed at young job seekers, helping founder J.T. O'Donnell develop ways to use Twitter and other technology to drive more traffic to the site.
He also proposed a detailed strategy for how Ms. O'Donnell could improve her page on Squidoo.com, a social-media site. That move impressed Ms. O'Donnell, who says she will consider hiring Mr. Cohen for a paid position if she has an opening.
It also helped Mr. Cohen land a second virtual internship with Squidoo.com this fall. He is one of five interns who are helping recruit comedians for a charity giveaway, research mothers who blog and launch a Web site for user-generated quizzes. The interns pick tasks from a list Squidoo co-founder Megan Casey posts online; she offers feedback when she can.
"If I can jump in with guidance and motivation and insight along the way, I do," says Ms. Casey. It "could be at 3 a.m., could be on a Sunday morning over eggs and coffee."
She and other employers say virtual internships can expand the pool of candidates and save money on office overhead. "There's just no way I would have gotten the same level of talent if I required a physical internship presence" at her office in North Hampton, N.H., says Ms. O'Donnell.
Still, Mr. Cohen, who works out of Long Island, N.Y., says communicating electronically with other Squidoo interns as far away as California and England makes it hard to tell if a colleague likes his ideas. "You don't have the tone of voice and the body language and things like that that let you know if you're going too far," he says.
Ms. Roig still blogs occasionally for Miriam Salpeter, the career coach in Atlanta for whom she was a virtual intern. Ms. Roig says many graphic-design jobs are virtual, so learning to use blogging software and improving her writing will help her career. She plans to seek other virtual internships while in graduate school. "I would definitely love to continue on the virtual path in my career," she says.
Wall Street Journal
