A virtual internship is an internship done entirely online: the intern works from home or from college for a host company in another city, or in another country. Companies that arrange virtual internships match students with host companies and run a structured programme around the work, with weekly coaching, set goals and a final project. An internship is a short period of work, usually 6 to 12 weeks, that gives a student experience before the first job.
Why online? Most internships are in a few large cities, such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Gurugram. A student from a smaller town must pay for rent and travel to take one, and many cannot afford to. An online internship removes that cost. It also lets a small company take an intern without giving the intern a desk.
Here is how a typical programme works. The student fills in a profile: course, skills, interests and the hours they can work each week. The arranging company matches the student with a host company that has a suitable project. Before the start, the student and the host's supervisor agree on goals for each week. During the internship, the student works on the host company's own tools, such as its chat, its code repository and its shared documents. A coach from the arranging company meets the student once a week and checks progress against the goals. At the end, the student presents the project, and the host writes an evaluation.
Imagine a third-year computer science student in Guwahati. She is matched with a logistics startup in Bengaluru for 8 weeks, 20 hours a week. Her project is a dashboard that shows which delivery routes are running late. In week 1, she gets access to the company's delivery data and meets her supervisor on video. By week 4, she shows a first version. In week 8, she presents the finished dashboard to the operations team, and her supervisor writes her evaluation. During campus placements, she can show the evaluation and the project to employers, on her profile on a campus recruiting platform.
Who pays? It varies. In some programmes, the host company pays the intern a stipend, a small monthly payment. In others, the student or the student's university pays the arranging company a fee for the matching and the coaching, and the internship itself is unpaid. A student should check which kind a programme is before signing up.
Online work has limits. An intern who never meets the team in person learns less about how an office works. That is why the weekly coaching and the agreed goals matter.
How is a virtual internship different from a job board that lists internships? A job board only lists openings, and the student applies on their own. A virtual internship company arranges the match and stays involved until the end. Students also gain experience in other ways, for example in contests on a hackathon platform or in a coding bootcamp, a short and intensive course that trains for one job.