While Queen’s Career Services can polish a resume, it’s sheer student willpower that ultimately earns the signature on a summer employment contract.
With summer in full swing, Queen’s students are eager to make the most of their break. However, there’s one looming thought that has occupied the minds of every undergraduate: finding a job. With Queen’s resources readily available to help ease the job application process, students have learned the benefits of independent networking as a starting point to find employment opportunities over the summer months.
Students like Aly Jamani, Comm ’27, have seemingly done everything right but still can’t seem to secure that sought-after student internship. Reports cite an unforgiving job market for students in Canada and it is now up to them to pivot their approach to the job hunt.
The challenges of getting a job
Searching for summer employment opportunities can begin with Queen’s portals like MyCareer, the Summer Work Experience Program (SWEP), the Queen’s Undergraduate Internship Program (QUIP), or Quest, and this is exactly where Jamani started.
“I’ve gone on SWEP a lot, I’ve gone into the career counsellor’s office, and Quest for the commerce portal,” Jamani said in an interview with The Journal.
Despite actively pursuing employment positions through these services, he has found that securing a direct placement through them requires a self-directed approach as opposed to depending on institutional support.
Jamani noted that relying solely on a digital portal rarely paints a full picture of the job hunt.
“All the online resources now, because of how many people are applying to jobs, they kind of just turn into voids,” he explained. For him, the campus job boards serve as a good foundational guide, but the ability to stand out in such a large applicant pool remains a challenge.
Jamani is not alone in this frustrating reality. Several students share the same sentiment when it comes to summer job applications.
In response to the student anxiety of being unemployed, Queen’s clarified its career-assisting resources. According to an official statement from QUIP, Queen’s offers students “a variety of career resources and employment programs to assist students in their career development and job search.”
They emphasized these programs run alongside extensive counselling, career fairs, and targeted networking workshops throughout the academic year.
In the 2025-26 academic year, 613 students completed full-time, paid internships through QUIP, while the University funded over 700 additional student jobs through SWEP and Work Study. Additionally, the MyCareer job board hosted over 650 job postings for Summer 2026.
While Queen’s posts hundreds of potential job openings, in a school with 21, 200 full-time undergraduate students, some will still need to rely on their personal network to find employment. With a large student population, and most seeking summer employment, QUIP acknowledges they do not fully track the reality of how undergraduates land summer job placements outside their provided resource programs.
“Many students use a combination of their own and Queen’s resources,” QUIP said. “Students arrive at Queen’s with different networks, and they immediately join ours, a community of current students and engaged alumni.”
Despite creating formal pathways, Taryn Lacey, ArtSci ’27, discusses how student frustration arises when trying to navigate some of the aforementioned resources, specifically QUIP. While QUIP provides students with a structured 12-to-16-month paid role, the parameters of the program may leave certain academic demographics behind. For students like Lacey, outside of traditional corporate streams, the job options can seem narrow and unaligned with their career goals.
As a Political Studies major with a minor in Global Development, Lacey found the University’s internship ecosystem lacking for her field.
“None of [the QUIP internship opportunities] aligned with what I wanted to do,” Lacey said in an interview with The Journal. She notes the internal job network leans heavily toward research-based roles rather than active political placements.
Consequently, the demand of a year-long QUIP placement presents a significant logistical headache for students.
“It would be awesome if there was a QUIP type of opportunity that was less than 12 months,” said Lacey, pointing out how students are deterred by the stressful reality of taking a full year off school and trying to sublet their Kingston homes for a long period of time.
Research grants available for Queen’s students
Students can apply for research grants as another option for summer employment. Programs like the Undergraduate Student Summer Research Fellowship (USSRF) offer different opportunities with numbered available positions. For instance, the USSRF provides funding for 67 students across the University per year.
These fellowships are valued at $10,832.64 for 16 weeks of full-time work, paying an hourly wage of $18.60. Similarly, the Federal Undergraduate Student Research Awards program through the Natural Science Engineering Research Council supports students with a $10,416 grant. Due to the responsibility placed on departments to cover a remaining balance of $4,272.64 per student, open roles depend on the financial backing granted to each professor.
Hamish Jansen, ArtSci ’27, successfully secured a sought-after USSRF grant to study adolescent emotional regulation at the Adolescent Dynamics Lab (ADL), working under Dr. Tom Hollenstein, a professor in the Department of Psychology.
While it is a paid research role, Jansen explained in an interview with The Journal it was difficult to secure as “there aren’t as many grants or as many professors accepting them.”
Queen’s Career Services and external resources
Because direct program placements remain a challenge to secure, students like Noah Oliveira, Sci ’28, find value in the University’s secondary support resources. Rather than acting as direct employment pipelines, he used services like resume guidance and career fairs to provide an essential baseline.
“I went to both of the career fairs for engineering and tech, and I thought they were pretty well organized,” Oliveira said in an interview with The Journal. He also credits campus staff for helping him reformat his resume, explaining it was a helpful tool.
Oliveira is an Engineering Physics major in the Computing stream currently working for 16 months as a verification engineer at Advanced Micro Devices, a position he secured by applying directly through the company’s website.
Jansen also used these additional resources and services when trying to make his research grant applications stand out, citing the resume reviews for his CV were particularly helpful when applying for these positions.
In addition to Queen’s resources, it is student-led organizations who have stepped in to provide more practical networking environments for students. Lacey explains she secured her summer 2026 internship with the Ontario Liberal Party, working under MPP Lee Fairclough, entirely through her campus club.
“I found this job through joining a campus club, QULA [Queen’s University Liberal Association],” she said. “Through events at the club, I networked with people from Lee’s team who then offered me the job.”
For Lacey, the realization that student clubs held the keys to actual employment opportunities was eye-opening.
“All of the support I got in finding my internship was given to me through my club and through the students who run the club, not necessarily the school,” she said.
Broader job market barriers
Aside from University resources, further grievances arise as students admit to facing challenges in the broader job market. “It’s just harder to get employed now as someone with only education and no experience,” Jamani said.
Students face further obstacles, especially in nailing down employer responses and scoring an interview. “It is challenging to get your name in the door and getting that initial interview,” Oliveira said.
“It’s kind of disheartening when you’re constantly applying to give away your time for free and you’re not even given a response,” Jansen said. He explained that volunteer experience plays a huge role in landing a paid research position, but the discouragement of being ignored by employers makes resilience difficult.
Sabrina Wu, ArtSci ’27, extended this list of struggles, citing how networking alongside seasoned professionals can be daunting.
“In university when you’re a young person, it’s a bit intimidating to go talk to professors and talk to people who are superior to you,” Wu said.
Networking and opportunities
As students continue to navigate the job market, independent networking takes center stage, and for some, the concept of personal connections has evolved into a survival skill. Jamani acknowledged that personal connections are critical, stating “the main [tool] has been my parents’ friends, because knowing the person helps a lot more.” For Jamani, a personal connection provides a direct line to a hiring manager that university resources do not provide.
Similarly, Lacey emphasized the influence of personal connections on professional life. “The way that I got my job currently, if you traced it all the way back, it did start with a family friend that kind of gave me the right advice,” Lacey said. While she met her current employers on Queen’s campus, her confidence and direction stemmed from the guiding words of external mentorship.
Wu further warned against viewing employer interactions through a purely transactional lens; instead finding sincere curiosity about other people’s life experiences naturally opens professional doors. For her, when professional networking is treated merely as a tool to secure a job offer, it seems to lose its genuine value.
As a Biology major, Wu secured her role as an Outreach and Education intern at the Queen’s University Biological Station (QUBS) through SWEP, but her career pathway was shaped by independent networking. She connected with a friend’s mother, leading to an unexpectedly profound conversation with an HR manager. “[The HR manager] talked about his career trajectory and some of the life lessons he learned in his early 20s,” Wu said.
His advice broadened her perspective and ultimately drove her to pursue an internship she didn’t originally intend on applying for, but now, she “absolutely loves the job.”
Wu strongly believes that students must pivot their networking approach in a tech-dominated world.
“In today’s time in the current political climate with how easily accessible technology is, we’ve turned talking to people and just connecting with people into this thing that has a specific motive behind it,” Wu said. She argues that approaching prospective employers with a desire for genuine connection yields the best professional outcomes.
Student suggestions to improve Career Services
Going forward, students like Jansen want to see reforms that better position institutional pathways to assist students. He suggests early advocacy to first-year students, arguing the University does not adequately inform students about the critical nature of student participation in field-specific experiences.
Jansen recommends a presentation for PYSC 100 students that emphasizes the necessity of gaining research experience in order to be successful on their degree path. He argues that the University should focus on helping lower-year students secure volunteer positions to eventually leverage paid work.
Oliveira takes a more modern, integrated approach to bridging the gap between students and corporate recruiters. He suggests a database for students to upload projects they have completed, creating an accessible portal for employers to view.
Ultimately, the modern-day summer internship hunt at Queen’s reveals numerous methods students utilize when entering the job market. However, with more than 95 per cent of Queen’s students employed within six months of graduation, the post-grad job market may be less daunting than what students are used to.
Tags
internships, Job hunting, Networking
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.