Intern Queen: Internships Help College Grads Gain Key "Real-World" Experience

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) -- The job market will be flooded this summer with new college grads. All of the students who've just graduated from Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State and other Michigan Schools now find themselves competing for a finite number of opportunities.

Having a couple of solid internships on your resume could help you get a leg up on the competition and could make the difference in who gets hired, and who is left searching.

Lauren Berger, who had 15 internships in her four years of college, calls herself the "Intern Queen."

"I went to a very large university and I think that I got a lot of personal attention at these internships that I wasn't necessarily getting inside of the classroom," Berger said. "I also felt that the internships were a way to sort of offset the information that I was learning in the classroom and really put it to use. I had just felt challenged in a way that I had never felt challenged before."

Berger used her experience to start a website called Intern Queen to help other students get the most out of their internships.

Berger claimed that students in Michigan have many opportunities for internships through major companies like Quicken Loans, Ford, and Domino's Pizza, and start up companies that have been opening their doors in downtown Detroit.

"I would look at the internship as the necessary experience to help you land a job after college," Berger said. "Maybe it will be at the company, but it also might not be, and that's okay. You want to really try to network and connect with as many people as possible so that after the internship you can tap into you contacts, networks and try to land a job."

According to a Forbes.com report, a survey conducted by Internship.com in 2013 claimed that 63 percent of college graduates said they had taken an internship, with 28 percent saying that they took two or more internships. The same report stated the 69 percent of large companies polled made full-time job offers to interns in 2012.