Experiential learning opportunities like internships, part-time positions, projects, contract and freelance work help you build valuable skills and assess your interest in pursuing the work full time. These hands-on opportunities also help you expand your professional network, which is key in a successful job search.
As a graduate student or postdoctoral scholar, your time is limited and valuable. Here are a few programs and resources that offer creative ways to develop your skills.
Internship Resources
Zero Credit Internships & Career Experiences Course
Career Success offers EXP 080: Internships & Career Experiences, a free zero-credit course, available to all graduate students participating in internships and other career experiences.
Internship Fund
UT Austin graduate students have access to funding that supports participation in unpaid internships during summer 2025. Career Success offers this funding for summer internships only.
UT Fellowships & Internships
Engage with companies and organizations to have an impact and solve workplace issues while gathering professional skills and experiences.
CONNECT Program
CONNECT is a semester-long, project-based fellowship where graduate students and community organizations work together to increase impact through better data and program evaluation practices. CONNECT fellows work collaboratively with nonprofit organizations to address data and evaluation challenges so that they can better understand their client or community landscape, gain meaningful insights into their work, and achieve their desired social impact.
Graduate Archer Fellowship Program
The Graduate Archer Fellowship Program provides graduate students from across The University of Texas System with a unique opportunity to live, learn, and intern in our nation’s capital during the summer.
While in D.C., students earn in-residence UT Austin credit for their coursework and gain hands-on work experience in an internship. Through a shared cohort experience, Graduate Archer Fellows build lasting friendships and professional connections with each other. The Graduate Archer Fellowship Program is tailored to students’ own personal and intellectual interests, which allows them to connect their developing expertise to policy and public service.
PhD Career Pathways
Inspired by the AAU PhD Education Initiative, PhD Career Pathways is a professional development and project-based internship opportunity for students to gain experience working in community and professional organizations. Fellows are paired with a dedicated graduate career advisor and participate in professional development seminars throughout the academic year.
Reimagining Professional Development Award
This award for graduate students and postdocs offers financial support for the production of programming, content, or training resources addressing the career and professional development needs of their peers across campus.
Austin Technology Incubator
The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) seeks highly motivated UT Austin students for exciting professional experiences working with early-stage, rapidly growing companies in their deep tech portfolio. Students may focus on our cleantech member companies or support internal ATI projects. They offer both paid and unpaid positions and participation may count towards class credit, internship requirements, or volunteer hours. Graduate and undergraduate students from all majors may apply.
Capacity Catalyst
Capacity Catalyst connects talented early career researchers with nonprofits and other types of social sector partners for part-time hosted externships specifically for data, research and evaluation. Externs provide key internal resources and technical expertise to their nonprofit hosts and receive ongoing peer-based and professional support from the Capacity Catalyst team, preparing them for a career of impact.
Discovery to Impact
Discovery to Impact helps graduate student entrepreneurs bring research discoveries to market. They provide support, IP protection and funding to help you launch startups, collaborate with established businesses, and accelerate new products, services, solutions and cures.
The Impact Factory
The Impact Factory is an engine for social innovation, entrepreneurship and community service at UT Austin; a first-of-its-kind, cross-sector collaboration that aims to measurably improve health and economic opportunity for vulnerable people in the United States. The Impact Corps program pairs student teams with community organizations and social enterprises to help partners address industry challenges and give students hands-on work experience.
Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Southwest Region Hub
The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps provides education, support and funding for researchers to learn the ropes of entrepreneurship, understand industry requirements and challenges and ultimately transform their research from ideation to commercialization. Through I-Corps training, scientists and engineers can extend their focus beyond the laboratory to increase the economic and societal impact of their research.
The LaunchPad at UT Austin
The LaunchPad is a resource hub that helps undergraduate and graduate students of all backgrounds navigate and explore entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin. Whether students want to become a small business owner, startup founder, side hustler/freelancer or social entrepreneur, the LaunchPad can support them with resources, training and funding. Beyond launching their own initiatives, the center helps students cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset they need to thrive personally and professionally in the 21st century.
Longhorn Impact Fellowship at Texas McCombs (LIFT) Program
The Longhorn Impact Fellowship at Texas McCombs (LIFT) Program matches students with corporations and non-profits to solve sustainability-focused challenges. Projects are completed in 10-12 weeks by teams of 4-6 students, and are related to corporate sustainability practices, reporting questions, market research for new innovations, corporate philanthropy, impact/ESG investing and more. Past projects created impact measurement tools for a corporate foundation, examined new markets for a social business’ entry and examined the sustainability of funding sources. LIFT is selective and is open only to UT-Austin juniors, seniors and graduate students.
Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs (JBTVL)
Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs (JBTVL) works campus-wide across disciplines to accelerate startups, take innovations to market and transform graduates into entrepreneurs and business owners. The JBTVL Practicum is a hands-on course for master and doctoral students, focusing on developing consulting skills and entrepreneurial expertise. The JBTVL Accelerator matches Austin-area startups with cross-functional teams of UT Austin graduate students for 10-week startup consulting projects. The TVL Investment Competition (TVLIC) mimics the real-world process of raising venture capital for student startups.
Sustainability Education and Enterprise Development (SEED)
The Sustainability Education and Enterprise Development (SEED) Challenge is a semester-long impact entrepreneurship program that provides mentorship, workshops, online materials and pitch competition funding to aspiring student innovators. SEED provides the community and support needed to move UT Austin student interest in sustainable innovation from ideation to implementation.
Texas Innovation Center
Texas Innovation Center is the hub at The University of Texas at Austin for bringing engineering and science discoveries and technologies to the market. Graduate-level experiential learning programs include Texas Bio Design (healthcare innovations) and Launch Texas (space-focused entrepreneurship and innovation).
Micro-Internships & Crowdsourcing Platforms
Crowdsourcing provides a way for companies and organizations to work on an issue or project, utilizing a large group of people to contribute to a solution with limited overhead. This model supports a large array of skills and expertise from freelance workers in a quick, efficient and typically virtual manner. Engage in this type of project-based work to gather industry experience, expand your network and contribute to your professional development.
UT Austin is not partnered or affiliated with any of the sites listed. Please use discretion when perusing opportunities, paying particular attention to intellectual property, compensation, privacy and ethical guidelines for each site.
Parker Dewey
Parker Dewey micro-internships are short-term, paid, professional projects that allow you to gain experience and explore careers at top employers.
Wazoku Crowd
Wazoku Crowd is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company enabling organizations to put unsolved problems and unmet needs out to the crowd to address.
MindSumo
MindSumo challenges let you flex your knowledge, earn cash and provide companies with innovative ideas that solve real world problems.
Challenge.gov
Challenge.gov is a web-based platform that assists federal agencies with inviting ideas and solutions directly from the public.
Kaggle
Kaggle is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.
Top Coder
Top Coder is a platform with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists and competitive programmers that pays community members for work on projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size and small-business clients.
Job Simulations
Job simulations are virtual platforms designed to immerse you into a field by performing job tasks and solving issues that exist in a real work environment. Explore careers actively and efficiently with this type of experience and gain key insights into various fields and industries of interest. While simulations are not meant to replace a “hands-on” internship, these projects can help you determine what type of internship experience and/or career you would like to pursue.
InterSECT
InterSECT is an online platform that allows PhD-level scientists and humanists, regardless of professional stage, to explore future career options by working on actual work projects and deliverables and evaluating interest and enjoyment in the work.
Create Your Own Experience
A traditional internship model may not be a good fit for everyone, especially advanced degree students and scholars who have demanding schedules and responsibilities. It is also important to note that not all internships or experiential learning opportunities are formally advertised. If you are interested in gaining hands-on experience and enhancing your professional skillset, be proactive and consider approaching companies and organizations with ideas for a unique type of internship that can be mutually beneficial.