As 45 students headed to New York City this semester, limited fall internship opportunities presented challenges for some students of the UT New York inaugural class.

UTNY is a semester-long program for students interested in the business, entertainment and media fields, allowing them to work and study in New York. A major component of the program is the internship experience, according to the official website. However, UTNY student Brooke Gilliard said students still had difficulty finding positions, partly because most firms simply do not offer fall internships.

“The bad thing is that in the fall, most massive (media) agencies … don’t do fall internships, so it’s really hard to get students into those networks, especially in finance,” advertising senior Gilliard said.

UTNY program manager Sidney Pan said the internship search process differed for students based on personal connections and experiences, but it was especially difficult for finance students. She said the finance internships the program found would not be offered to UT students only coming for the fall or the spring because companies focus their programs on the summer.

However, she said the alumni network and the reputation of UT students helped them secure internships.

“Our students are really well-known around New York for not having a chip on their shoulder, not having an attitude, coming in ready to work, having a little bit of grit (and) having a really good attitude,” Pan said.

Economics senior Alikhan Virani said the program was doing its best to help the inaugural class, but he still found it tough to find an internship.

“If worse came to worse and you couldn’t find anything on your own or you didn’t put in the effort, then they would find something for you at the end,” Virani said. “The way it panned out was that companies won’t give out their offers for their fall internships until a week, two weeks before the semester starts, so (I was) scrambling and super stressed.”

UTNY student Zaid Basit said he did not find the internship search too difficult because UTNY staff helped throughout the process.

“There are certain internships that everyone can apply to online, but (Pan) would go out of her way to find contacts within the companies,” finance junior Basit said. “Most of the time, we got interviews with the companies we were applying to just because we had a connection into the company.”