Great work, congrats on the offer! When your recruiter calls or emails you to share the great news, you should come across as excited and grateful. This call isn’t the time to share location preferences (unless asked) or try to negotiate. Similarly, unless you’re 100% sure, you shouldn’t verbally accept the job. However, this is a great time to ask about salary, location, relocation benefits/resources (if applicable), start date, team selection, mentorship, and whatever other questions you have about the job.

SalaryIn terms of salary, almost no companies will negotiate with interns, so we don’t recommend asking for more money unless you have a specific reason. However, you might be able to ask for your ideal location (if the job is in-person), or ask to be remote (if that’s your preferred situation and the company allows remote work).

While a high salary is great, you have to balance this aspect of the job with things like learning opportunities, work-life balance, mentorship, and location. If you’re indifferent between two offers and one pays better, great! But if you have one low-paying offer to join a great company and a high-paying one for a company you’re not thrilled about, our advice is to sacrifice the money (if you can afford to). An extra few thousand dollars over the course of a summer is much less valuable than the other aspects of the job that we mentioned at the start of this paragraph.

LocationSimilarly, we’d recommend being as flexible as possible on location. It’s good to have preferences, but taking a chance on a new city or part of the country/world is awesome too. It’s just for one summer, and even if you don’t like the new city at least you’ll return home with a better sense of where you want to begin your career.

On the other hand, you should also keep in mind where you might want to work long-term. Internships often convert to full time jobs, so if you’re entering your last year of college, consider where you’d want to work and who you’d want to work for after college.