
Red wagon. Need I say more? I bet you are already picturing Dennis the Menace pulling his Radio Flyer wagon behind his little red bike. Or maybe you’re thinking about your village’s 4th of July parade where all the kids decorate their bikes and pull wagons behind them with their younger siblings in them (ok maybe that’s just my memory). Almost everyone has some childhood memory associated with Radio Flyer. What’s yours? If for some reason wagon rides and Radio Flyer weren’t part of your childhood, check out this video. Continue reading about Radio Flyer…

When we heard the name Lime Energy, our first thought was of a lime battery (close relative of the more common lemon battery). Since they’re a company that is all about energy efficiency, they’re probably not proponents of running a building entirely off of lime power. Although that may sound like a green alternative, we’d imagine that it would be extremely inefficient. Here’s a consulting interview type question - how many limes would it take to power Lime Energy’s office building for a day? Continue reading about Lime Energy…

It’s getting late. Many internships have already started, and others are starting in the next few weeks. We’re doing our best to continue finding great internship opportunities for this summer, but it’s getting harder to find internships that are worth writing about (if you know any companies that are still hiring interns for this summer, please contact us). At this point the best bet is to go local, and one employer that often takes on summer interns is the local government. That’s why we’re looking at the Chicago Department of Innovation & Technology and its internship program today. Continue reading about Chicago Department of Innovation & Technology…

As it gets later and later in the internship hunting season, you need to change the focus of your internship search to more local possibilities. There are still opportunities to get an internship half way across the country, fly in for interview, land the job, and spend the summer in a new city, but they’re dwindling quickly. That type of hiring process just doesn’t work well in May for Summer internships. As disappointing as it may seem, you might have to spend the summer living with Mom and Dad. What kind of local options do you have? It depends where you live. One option that is available in many locales is interning for a local tv station. Most areas have some form of local station, and these stations can always use interns. It’s not as glamorous as interning for a major network, but the experience can be much more hands on. One example of a local television station that is still hiring Summer interns is Your TV20 in San Francisco. Continue reading about Your TV20…

I’ve been through a lot with my Columbia jacket. I first bought it for a high school “team building” trip that included a hike up a mountain in November. I was on the hefty side back then, so the hike was quite a trying task. By the time I reached the summit, I was a bit overheated to say the least. The jacket came off, and I enjoyed the much easier hike on the way down not realizing that my brand new jacket was still at the top of the mountain. I thought my Mom was going to kill me, because going back up to get it was not an option. Luckily a guide from another group grabbed the jacket and brought it down for me. That was almost 10 years ago (which is really scary, by the way I feel old and I’m only 23). Since then I’ve used the jacket to slide down snowy hills on my stomach on the way back from class and sneak fish into the Cornell-Harvard hockey game. The jacket is still in great shape, and goes to show that Columbia Sportswear Company makes one hell of a product.
Besides the fact that I like Columbia for their great jackets, Performance Fishing Gear, and Reel Stories videos, I also like them for their Chairman of the Board, Gertrude Boyle. She is the star of many of Columbia’s television ads, where she is best known as “one tough mother.” Columbia is run by the family that started it, but they are now publicly traded, which means that the investor relations section of their website offers a plethora of material to research. It’s pretty amazing that the whole company was started by a couple who fled Germany for Portland, Oregon and bought a hat distributorship.
Although Columbia makes great sportswear, they don’t know how to put together a decent Careers site. Or maybe we should say that Taleo, their Applicant Tracking System provider, doesn’t know how to put together a decent Careers site. Either way, all Columbia has is a job search function and a list of benefits. The most frustrating thing is that their job search function only turns up one of their internships, when we’ve found 4 by digging a little deeper.
You knew there was a reason that you subscribed. It’s probably because we find the internships that you would never find. A search for “internships” on Columbia’s Careers site turns up one listing (while a search for “intern” turns up none). The easy to find internship is in Apparel Sourcing. The saving grace is that Columbia has an RSS feed for job search results, so if you search all jobs and then click the RSS feed, you can find a couple more internship listings. We found two internships (here and here) in Industrial Engineering at their Distribution Center. The last internship that we found is not listed on their website, but was posted yesterday on a closed job board that we have access to. It is in Promotions, and is perfect for someone with an interest in Marketing or Public Relations, as long as it’s still available (if you’d like more details about this internship, leave a comment with your real e-mail address in the e-mail box - nobody can see it but us). We also found a now defunct listing from 4 days ago about a Footwear Internship, but we couldn’t find any more details about it. All of Columbia’s internships are located in Portland, OR.
Despite Columbia’s lackluster career site and relatively boring descriptions on their internship postings, we still think they’re a pretty cool company. They’re worth a look, especially now that it’s May.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
What’s your experience with Columbia Sportswear?

I’ll admit it; I’ve become a mild Twitter addict. I just keep finding internships to write about by scanning tweets and following the links that they contain. It’s getting late in the game, and harder and harder to find companies that are still looking for Summer interns, but using unorthodox methods can turn up some great results. Most recently, I found a link to a post by a Sun Microsystems employee who is looking for two interns. Her post led us to Sun’s main Careers site, which truly impressed us. Continue reading about Sun Microsystems…

“Many Burton employees will snag freshies first thing in the morning before coming in to work during the winter.” Being non “riders,” we’re don’t know a whole lot about snowboarding, but we can be pretty sure that interns at Burton’s Burlington, VT office probably won’t have this luxury. It’s not that Burton doesn’t care about their interns, it’s just that “freshies” are kind of hard to snag in the heat of the summer. That’s ok, though, because Vermont is beautiful in the Summer and offers plenty of other outdoor opportunities for when you’re not helping Burton at the world’s first snowboard factory. Continue reading about Burton…

Judging by the name, you might think that Southface is a company that produces “barely there” fashions for destinations that one might visit on Spring Break. Since the North Face is all about warm clothes, that’d be a good guess. Too bad it would be a wrong guess. Southface isn’t a company (it’s a non-profit organization), and it doesn’t manufacture clothing. They do work to provide “responsible solutions for environmental living” through education, research, advocacy and technical assistance. Continue reading about Southface…

Real estate. Don’t let those two words scare you away. Just because the market is ugly right now doesn’t mean that you should stop considering a future career in realty. First of all, you’re at least a year from graduation - market conditions will likely change (although not necessarily for the better). Second, we’re really good at finding you great internships in struggling industries - like how we told you to look at non-profit internships in finance. Third, a bad market almost always yields new opportunities for innovative companies. Redfin is a company that we’ve found that is insulating itself by using technology and price competition to take advantage of a weak market, and they’re still hiring interns. Continue reading about Redfin…

We’ll be the first to admit that we’ve been slacking off this week. It’s tough finding new companies that offer entry-level jobs and internships every day. It’s even tougher sitting by the pool while you do it on Spring Break - so many distractions. We’ve persevered and ignored the lure of the 80 degree water to bring you IDEO, a great company with quite a few internship opportunities for college students. Continue reading about IDEO…

Finding a St. Patrick’s Day related internship for you was harder than finding a four leaf clover in a monsoon, but we did it. We’re not sure how you’re celebrating, considering St. Paddy’s Day falls during many Spring Breaks and Holy Week, but have a bowl of Lucky Charms for us - unless, of course, you gave them up for Lent. Many people think that mining is much like searching for a pot of gold, but Luck Stone is a company that considers the stuff you dig through to be the “pot of gold.” Continue reading about Luck Stone…

Last week we wrote about Sarasota, FL based Animal Replacement Technologies on One Day, One Job. There was no indication that they were hiring new grads, but we really liked their story, so we encouraged our readers to take a look and inquire about jobs if they were so inclined. Soon after we posted, Animal Replacement Technologies founder Dr. Christopher Sakezles left a comment inviting our readers to apply for summer internships in engineering with his company (and also asking potential applicants not to cold call, but to e-mail instead). It was exciting for us to have one of Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year Reader Favorites leave a comment on our website; moreover, we realized that it was a perfect opportunity for us to share the excitement with our internship searching readers. If you read One Day, One Job as well, we apologize for sometimes being redundant and talking about the same companies on both sites, but we want to make sure that the internships we talk about are some of the most interesting and most worthwhile out there. Continue reading about Animal Replacement Technologies…
The other kids begged their parents to take them to the zoo. Animals were exciting to them. Animals move and eat. They make weird sounds. They smell funny. Plants have none of those appeal factors. Plants don’t move, they grow. They absorb their nutrients. They’re soundless. And they smell good (most of them anyways). To most kids that spells B-O-R-I-N-G, but not to you. You realize that the zoo is an 86-minute comedy movie, while a botanical garden is 142 minutes of Academy Award winning cinematic genius. So, if you were the kid that ignored the cheap thrills of the zoo for the higher art of the botanical garden, then today’s internships will bud your interest. Continue reading about New York Botanical Garden…
Over on One Day, One Job, we recently mentioned that Facebook now has a valuation on par with that of the Ford Motor Company. In our post about Facebook, we noted how amazing it is that so much wealth can be created seemingly out of thin air; however, we didn’t mention the contrasting point that American auto manufacturers have had a similarly amazing ability to hemorrhage money. It’s sad to say, but the reason for the decline of the Big Three has a lot to do with foreign auto companies like Honda making better cars, and often doing it with American talent! Continue reading about Honda R&D…