Guides / Cold email an internship

How to Cold Email Your Way Into an Internship

By Amrik, Penn sophomore and Cold Open author. Updated July 14, 2026.

If you are a student trying to land an internship right now, your process probably looks like mine did: open a portal, upload a resume, rewrite the same three short-answer questions, hit submit, and hear nothing. Not a rejection. Nothing. You do this thirty times and start to wonder if the applications go anywhere at all.

I'm Amrik, a sophomore at Penn and co-founder of a startup. Last cycle I decided to stop waiting on portals and test something else. I sent 45 cold emails to companies where I knew no one. Zero connections, zero referrals, zero warm intros. 44 of them delivered, and within 48 hours I had 8 replies from founders and executives. One more person replied on LinkedIn after my email to them bounced.

That is not a magic trick. It is a repeatable process, and this article is the whole thing: how to pick companies, how to find the right person, what to write, and what to do after. You can run all of it without buying anything from me.

Why cold email works when applications do not

An application portal is a lottery. Your resume lands in a stack with hundreds or thousands of others, gets filtered by software that is looking for reasons to say no, and maybe gets a few seconds of human attention. You are one row in a spreadsheet. Nobody in that pipeline is thinking about you as a person.

An inbox is the opposite. Email is one to one. When a founder opens your message, for those few seconds you are the only candidate in the room. There is no filter between you and the person who can actually say yes. Small companies especially often have no formal internship program at all, which means there is no portal, no stack of competitors, and no process. If a founder likes you, they can just create the role. Plenty of companies like this never advertise internships anywhere.

There is a second reason it works: almost no students do it. Everyone applies through portals because it feels safe and official. Very few 19-year-olds will write a specific, respectful email to a founder. When you do, you stand out simply by showing up in a channel your competition never uses.

Step 1: Pick 10 companies you actually care about

Do not build a list of 200 companies and blast them. It shows, and it wastes the one advantage you have, which is that you can be genuinely specific in a way no mass applicant can.

Start with 10. The filter is simple: could you talk about this company for two minutes without preparing? If you follow a defense startup because you read everything about autonomy, or a biotech lab because their research overlaps with your coursework, those go on the list. If you only know a company because it appeared on a "top places to intern" ranking, leave it off.

Some practical sourcing ideas:

• Companies mentioned in newsletters, papers, or podcasts you already consume for fun
• Startups founded by alumni of your school (people reply faster to shared context)
• Companies whose product you have actually used, or whose research you have actually read
• Recently funded startups in your field, because they are hiring and the team is still small enough that the founder reads their own email

Small and mid-size companies are the sweet spot. At a 15-person startup, your email reaches someone with the power to say yes. At a 50,000-person company, it usually reaches someone whose job is to route you back to the portal.

Step 2: Find the right person

Who you email matters as much as what you write.

• At small companies (under roughly 50 people): email a founder or an exec. They read their own inbox, they can make decisions on the spot, and they remember what it was like to be scrappy. These are exactly the people you want reading your email.
• At bigger companies: skip the CEO. Email the lead of the specific team you want to join, such as the head of a research group or an engineering manager. They feel the pain of being understaffed and can champion you internally, which a generic recruiter will not.

Never email info@ or careers@ addresses. Those are where messages go to die. You want a named human.

Finding the person is the easy part: LinkedIn, the company's team page, or the author list on a paper. Finding their actual work email takes a little more technique, but it is very learnable. Most work emails follow a small number of patterns (first@company.com, first.last@company.com, and so on), and there are free tools that let you verify a guess before you send, so you are not firing blind. Out of my 45 emails, 44 delivered, and that hit rate came from verifying every address first. I wrote up the exact method I used, and it is a free download: get the email-finding method at coldopen.pro. It costs $0 and it is the same process behind every email in my campaign.

Step 3: The anatomy of an email that gets a reply

The whole email should be under 120 words. Founders read email on their phones between meetings. Long emails get saved for later, and later never comes. Here are the four parts.

The subject line

Plain and specific beats clever. You are not writing a marketing subject line, you are writing the kind of subject a colleague would send. Something like "Penn sophomore, question about your autonomy work" or "student interested in [specific project]" tells them exactly who you are and why you are writing. Avoid anything that smells like a template: no "Quick question!", no emojis, no fake reply prefixes.

One true first line

The first sentence has one job: prove you are not a mass email. It should contain something that could only be written about this specific company. Not flattery ("I love what you're building!") but evidence: a reference to their recent product launch, a detail from a technical blog post, a question raised by a paper someone on the team published. If your first line would still make sense pasted into an email to a different company, rewrite it.

One credibility line

One sentence on who you are, built from your strongest specifics. School and year, plus the one or two things that are actually relevant: a project, a class, a competition, a job. As a student you do not need an impressive resume here. You need one concrete signal that you can do work. "I built X" beats "I am passionate about Y" every time.

One small ask

This is where most students blow it. Do not ask for an internship in the first email. That is a big, awkward request from a stranger, and it is easy to say no to. Ask for something small instead: 15 minutes to ask a couple of questions about their work, or whether they ever take on interns and who the right person to talk to would be. A small ask is easy to say yes to, and once you are in a conversation, the internship question becomes natural instead of cold.

Put together, the skeleton looks like this:

Subject: Penn sophomore, question about [specific thing they do]

Hi [Name], I read [specific true thing about their company] and it stuck with me because [honest reason]. I'm a sophomore at [school] studying [field], and I recently [one concrete credibility point]. I'm trying to learn as much as I can about [their space]. Would you be open to 15 minutes sometime in the next couple weeks? Happy to work around your schedule.

That is the shape. The words have to be yours, because the entire mechanism is that it reads like a real person wrote it.

Step 4: What to do when they reply

A reply is not the finish line, and it is where preparation matters most. A few rules:

• Respond fast. Same day, ideally within a few hours. A founder who replies is briefly paying attention. Do not let that window close.
• Make scheduling effortless. Offer two or three specific windows and say you will work around whatever suits them. Never make an exec chase you for a time.
• Prepare like it is an interview, because it is. Reread everything you can find about the company. Bring two or three real questions about their work, not questions you could answer with a Google search.
• Let the internship come up naturally. If the conversation goes well, it is completely fine to say something like "I'd love to find a way to contribute this summer. Is that something you'd be open to?" You asked for 15 minutes and delivered a good conversation. You have earned the bigger question now.

And if the reply is a no, or a "we're not hiring interns right now": thank them, ask if you can stay in touch, and mean it. A polite no from a founder today is a warm contact next cycle.

Step 5: Follow-up etiquette

Most replies come fast or not at all, but some people genuinely read your email, meant to respond, and got buried. So one follow-up is worth sending, and only one.

Wait 3 to 4 days, then reply to your own thread with two sentences. Something like: "Hi [Name], just floating this back to the top of your inbox in case it got buried. Totally understand if the timing isn't right." That is it. No guilt trips, no "I know you're busy but," no third attempt. After one bump, stop. Silence is an answer, and respecting it protects your reputation in what is usually a small industry.

One more thing worth knowing: if an email bounces, the thread is not necessarily dead. One of my nine total replies came through LinkedIn after my email to that person bounced. A short, polite LinkedIn message with the same content is a fine fallback when the address fails.

Realistic expectations

Here is the honest math. I sent 45 emails and got 8 replies over email. That means 37 people, more than 80 percent, never responded. And that campaign went well.

If you send 10 careful emails and hear nothing from 8 of them, your campaign is working normally. Cold email is a numbers game played with high-quality attempts, not a spell that works every time. The failure mode to avoid is not silence. It is taking silence personally, deciding the method is broken, and quitting after five sends. Every non-reply costs you nothing: no burned bridge, no black mark, nothing. The founder forgot your email existed thirty seconds after skimming it. Meanwhile each reply is a live conversation with someone who can actually change your summer.

I cannot promise you replies, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. What I can tell you is that the process above is exactly what I ran, the numbers are exactly what happened, and none of it required connections I did not have.

Where to go from here

Everything in this article is enough to start today. Pick your 10 companies this week, find your first three addresses, and send.

If you want the tooling, the free tier is the place to begin: my complete method for finding and verifying anyone's work email address is a $0 download at coldopen.pro/#free. It solves the most annoying mechanical problem in this whole process.

If you want the full system, the Cold Open playbook is $29. It includes the complete playbook, my full swipe file of templates, and a 1-on-1 markup where I personally edit your draft before you send it. The $59 Deluxe tier adds a teardown of every real email I sent in the campaign described above, plus the tracker I used to manage the outreach. Both come with a 30-day full refund, and you keep the files either way.

Portals will still be there if you want them. But your ten best emails will do more thinking about you than a thousand rows in someone's applicant tracking system ever will.