visuals + news appsHow to apply to an internship at NPR Visuals
(This post was edited in June 2022.)
We want to see your best work. Here’s how.
Who’s Eligible
To be eligible for an internship with NPR, you must be a college student (undergraduate or graduate) or a person who has graduated no more than 12 months prior to the start of the internship period. You must be planning to work from the United States and authorized to work in the United States throughout the internship term.
Cover letters
All candidates must submit a cover letter. Your cover letter should be a statement of purpose. We’re interested in what you’re passionate about and why you’re passionate about it. (Most cover letters tell us that you are hardworking, passionate and talented, etc. And that you love NPR. We don’t need you to tell us that.)
- Tell us what you care about and work on.
- Tell us why you are passionate about your work.
- Tell us why this opportunity will help you reach your potential.
- Tell us how you will contribute to our team.
There are also a few simple style tips you should keep in mind:
- Use hyperlinks for any reference to online work. We’re mostly reading your work on our computers, and being able to click a link saves a lot of time.
- Export your resume, cover letter, and all other documents as PDF. PDF is more secure and portable than Microsoft Word files.
Portfolios
- All candidates must have an online portfolio.
- For coding candidates, we also ask for a Github profile. Applicants may use their Github projects as a portfolio. (If sharing via Github is not an option for you, please provide us another way to evaluate your technical skills. This might entail sharing a side project, writing up how you approached a project, or submitting a code sample in a different form.)
Portfolio projects and work samples should always include your role in the work if it was done on a team. When talking about your work, we want to hear about what was good but also about what you’d change.
Selection process
After you submit a resume and cover letter, our selection committee will read through all the applications. We’ll reduce the list to approximately 8-10 candidates by eliminating applications that don’t have a cover letter and resume or who clearly aren’t a good fit for the team.
If you’re one of these candidates, a few folks from the team will conduct a short interview with you over video chat (such as Zoom or Google Meet). Our interviews usually last 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the applicant pool and our availability.
You’ll get an email before your interview with outline of the questions you’ll be asked in the interview and also given the opportunity to ask any questions beforehand. The questions may vary a bit from interview to interview based on your professional experience, but we will be as consistent as possible.
If you make it to the interview round, we’ll collect references if you haven’t uploaded them already. Then we’ll call your references and conduct some follow-up via email, possibly asking one or two more substantial, interview-style questions. Email communication is crucial in our workplace, and gives us an opportunity to see how you communicate in writing. We expect that answers are prompt, succinct, and clear.
Who we are
We’re a small group of photographers, videographers, photo editors, developers and designers in the NPR newsroom who make visual journalism. Check out our latest stuff!
Why we’re doing this
We want to open our field to the best people out there, but the process doesn’t always work that way. So we’re trying to make the job application process more accessible.
Applicants with strong cover letters and good interview skills naturally tend to do well in this process. Often, those skills are a result of coaching and support — something that not all students are privileged to have. To help candidates without those resources, we’re being more transparent about our process and expectations.
We’re certain that we’re missing out on candidates with great talent and potential who don’t have that kind of support in their lives. We think knowing our cover letter expectations and interview questions ahead of time will help level the playing field, keep our personal bias out of the interview process, and allow better comparisons between candidates.
Current positions
Our paid fall/winter 2022-23 internship program runs from Oct. 3 to April 15. Check out our careers site for more information. Here are the internships available this term.
We hope to hear from you!
