Some interns at Big Tech and consulting giants are already earning six-figure salaries
New data from Glassdoor has shattered the notion that lucrative careers require years of toil. Instead, a select group of fortunate graduates are securing the equivalent of six-figure salaries straight out of college.
Gone are the days of unpaid internships spent fetching coffee for executives. According to the employer review site, top companies like Bain & Company, Roblox, and Amazon are offering internships that pay upwards of $9,000 per month this summer.
To qualify for Glassdoor’s rankings of the best internships in 2024, companies needed a minimum of 30 salary ratings and 15 career opportunities ratings from interns based in the U.S.
Despite notable layoffs across the tech industry, including significant cuts in middle management, Big Tech remains a beacon of generous paychecks and ambitious career prospects for the brightest minds of tomorrow.
18 of the 25 top internships featured on the list are tech companies, while the rest of the roundup is made of finance firms and consulting companies, from BlackRock to McKinsey.
According to the data, Roblox pays its interns the most with a $10,333 per month median base salary, which is equivalent to over $125,000 a year.
But a word of warning from Glassdoor to those holding out for a top-paying internship at the $23 billion gaming giant: “While we can’t guarantee that all of these companies are still hiring interns this summer, we can confirm they’ve been known to pay interns competitively and provide a positive experience.”
Fortune has reached out to all the companies on the list for comment.
Glassdoor’s ranking of businesses offering the best internships
1. Bain & Company
Median Base Monthly Salary: $9,000
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.9
2. Roblox
Median Base Monthly Salary: $10,333
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.4
3. Nvidia
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,333
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.9
4. JPMorgan
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,333
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.7
5. Amazon
Median Base Monthly Salary: $9,000
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.4
6. Atlassian
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,166
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.7
7. Capital One
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,833
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.5
8. Barclays
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,833
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.6
9. Uber
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,666
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.5
10. Adobe
Median Base Monthly Salary: $8,500
Career Opportunity Rating: 4.5
See the full list on Glassdoor.
But don’t expect bagging an internship to be easy
While internships are better paid than they once were, don’t expect getting one under your belt to be as easy as it was for your parent’s generation—or even your millennial siblings.
No longer does asking to pick a hiring manager’s brains in exchange for coffee cut it. Even newer alternative methods to piquing recruiters’ attention, like dropping them a message on LinkedIn are no longer enough to make young people stand out.
It’s why Gen Z students are now being forced to get creative to get a foot in the door.
Egyptian-born Basant Shenouda told Fortune that she used LinkedIn to see which conferences recruiters were posting about and then volunteered to work at those events, armed with a stack of résumés to show them in her break.
It worked—she landed an internship at LinkedIn.
Another Gen Zer, Ayala Ossowski, used the 20 hours a week she was already working at a pizza shop in suburban Washington, to try to get poached by DC’s elite.
She wore a baseball cap emblazoned with her university logo on the front to every shift and launched into an elevator pitch any time a customer asked about it.
After a month of pitching herself while serving pizza, Ossowski landed her first internship.
“The market is so saturated with such incredible talent that it takes some creativity in order to stand out from the crowd,” she concluded.
