Job search tools and AI

Free through Queens College

• HireQC (Handshake). QC's job and internship board, including work-study jobs. Sign in with your QC credentials.
• Résumé reviews. Book a career educator on QC Navigate, or submit your résumé for review in Handshake. The Center for Career Engagement and Internships is in Frese Hall 213.
• Vault Career Intelligence. Profiles of employers, industries and 900 internships, plus interview guides. Create a free account.
• The Forage. Free, self-paced job simulations from real employers, a good way to try out a field.
• Parker Dewey micro-internships. Paid projects for real companies, usually 10 to 40 hours of work.
• Tech Incubator at Queens College. Free Google and AWS certificates, such as Google Data Analytics; the incubator covers the cost. Apply with one short form. Its micro-internships put CUNY students on a real problem for a client company, a quick way to start a portfolio.

Job boards with email alerts

• USAJOBS. Federal jobs. Filter by the Students or Recent Graduates hiring path, and see federal internships. Internship postings are often open only about two weeks, so turn on alerts.
• NYC Jobs. New York City government jobs. Many city titles require a civil service exam; see the exam schedule.
• Idealist. Nonprofit and public-interest jobs, with daily email alerts.
• PREDOC.org. Research jobs before a PhD. Sign up on the page to get postings in your field by email.
• LinkedIn job alerts. Up to 20 alerts, sent daily or weekly. Its AI job search lets you describe the job you want in your own words.

More résumé help

• Headless Headhunter. A recruiter's free résumé guide, templates and résumé review episodes. He writes for corporate jobs, so take his advice with a grain of salt for government, nonprofit and academic applications. It's most useful if you pair political science with something like data, business or tech.
• Samples on this site. A one-page résumé and an academic CV, and a law school résumé.

AI that helps without writing for you

For profiles, prompts, interview practice and what not to do, see Using AI the right way.

CUNY licenses one generative AI tool for all students: Microsoft Copilot Chat. Sign in with your CUNY Login email, not a personal Microsoft account. That way your chats fall under Microsoft's enterprise data protection and aren't used to train its models. Even so, CUNY's AI guidance says not to share sensitive or identifiable information with any AI tool.

• Read a posting. Paste in a job or program description and ask for a checklist of what it requires and what you need to prepare.
• Track deadlines. Ask it to turn your list of programs into a table of deadlines, materials and recommenders, then copy it into Excel.
• Practice interviews. Ask it to play the interviewer for a specific internship, one question at a time. Answer out loud, then ask for feedback.
• Prepare for a conversation. Ask it to summarize an organization's recent work before an interview or networking call, then check those facts on the organization's own site.
• Job-search apps. Apps like Jobright match you to postings and track your applications. Most have a free plan, and many software companies give students a discount: sign up with your CUNY email and look for student pricing before you pay.