How to choose between internship offers: seven questions to ask before you accept

Who will supervise you, and is that person named?

An offer that names a team or a department, and no person, leaves the supervision question open. Write back and ask for the name and the role of whoever you will report to, and keep the reply in the email thread, because a name you can point at three months later is what turns an offer into an account of your work. Where that answer does not come back, you choose to accept a term without knowing who will read what you send.

Read the host's own internship page before you reply, and notice which parts of it are addressed to interns. A page that runs its volunteering and its internship routes together can promise a manager to speak to, regular feedback and a certificate of acknowledgement in the part written for volunteers, and set none of it out for interns. A commitment written for a different group is not one you can hold anyone to.

Where the host is small, a single line on its own site saying who runs its internships tells you more than a well-formatted offer letter with no name in it. If that line is missing, ask for it, and do the same check before you apply as well as before you accept. The guide on where online internships are listed covers that earlier step.

Is there a weekly deliverable, and who reads it?

A deliverable is something specific, a report, a draft, a dataset, that a named person reads and answers by a set day. Without one, weeks fill with tasks nobody wrote down, and six months later you will struggle to describe them to anyone who asks.

Put the question in the same message as the one about your supervisor: what is the first thing I hand in, and when is it due? A vague answer is not disqualifying for a short informal placement, but it changes what the placement gives you, which is attendance rather than output.

Published terms tell you how much room a term leaves for that. The application form on CRY's volunteering and internships page expects five to six hours a day, across four weeks at minimum, and its FAQ states that, being a non-profit, CRY internships are not paid. A month at that intensity has room for three or four rounds of written work, but nothing on the page commits the host to a reporting cycle, so confirm that part directly rather than reading it into the hours.

What a weekly load of that size asks of an ordinary semester is worked through in the guide to the hours you agree before you start.

There is a later payoff here too. When a recruiter or an admissions form asks what you did, one sentence about a weekly report and the feedback on it answers the question. A month of logged attendance leaves you paraphrasing a job description.

Does any stage of this cost you money?

Internshala's student help centre answers this for its own listings in one line: "Absolutely not! It's a free platform." The same page tells students not to pay an employer, because charging students is against the platform's policy. Its listing page showed about 7,200 internships on 19 September 2026, so that rule runs across a board of real size. Where an employer found there does ask for money, the same page tells students to report it immediately, with the offer letter and the messages attached, rather than pay.

A separate category of site sells the paperwork on its own and says so on the page. One such page prices a verified internship certificate plus one further document at ₹1,000, either an official completion letter or a set of project source files, and all three at ₹1,500. It states that no physical attendance is involved, that there is no fixed schedule, and that the documents are produced for immediate download. Its own disclaimer says the site provides no internships, employment, training or placements.

So the question to put to any fee is what it buys: supervised work across a set number of weeks, or a document. A placement cell or an interviewer asks about the work. The guide on what a free certificate offer can mean sets out the four different products that phrase covers.

Is the stipend one payment or several?

A quoted figure can mean a single payment at the end of the term or an amount that arrives every month, and the two carry different risk if the host delays payment or your term is cut short. Settle that before you turn another offer down, and settle in the same message what happens to the money if you leave early.

Official schemes write this out at a length private hosts rarely match. The National Commission for Women's instructions for interns describe Scheme A as a paid internship of Rs. 5000 for a period of 30 days, while the stipend column reads "Rs.5,000/- P.M.", so the figure covers one 30 day block rather than a rate that keeps running.

Check who a scheme is open to before you weigh it against anything. Scheme A admits law students at two stages only, the first year of a three year LLB or the third year of a five year LLB, along with first year postgraduates in sociology, social work, gender studies or women's studies, all needing 60% or better from Class XII onwards in each semester. That rules most readers out.

The same instructions add that no stipend is paid where an intern works less than the specified period of the Scheme. Official routes and what each of them publishes are compared in the guide on government internship portals beyond AICTE.

With a private host you are usually asking rather than reading, which is why the question beats an assumption in either direction. Stipend, unpaid and performance-based are unpicked in the guide on money words on an Indian listing.

How long is the term, and how many hours a day?

Get both numbers, because one without the other tells you very little. A four week term at five to six hours a day is a far heavier commitment than four weeks at two hours a day, and both would read as "one month" on a resume line.

Weigh those hours against your class timetable now rather than in week two. A term that assumes weekday daytime availability will collide with lectures for most full-time students, so establish whether the hours are fixed or can move to evenings and weekends before you agree to them.

Start dates are worth the same scrutiny. A scheme that takes applications on a fixed quarterly cycle closes its window on a stated date whether or not you are ready, so an offer you accept elsewhere can cost you an intake that does not reopen for three months. Ask when the next cycle opens before you turn anything down.

Then cross-check the length against what you plan to say afterwards. A one or two week programme supports a claim about one finished piece of work. A term of four weeks or more supports an account of how your work changed over time, which is a different and more useful thing to be able to say.

Can anyone check the certificate later?

Find out whether the certificate carries a number, a verification link, or a named contact who will confirm you worked there if a college or an employer calls. A PDF with your name on it and nothing behind it is worth less to a placement cell than one that can be confirmed in a single search or a single phone call.

This matters most wherever the fee question already gave you pause. Where a document is sold as a product in its own right, nothing on the document itself separates it from one earned through supervised work, unless the issuer explains how a third party could check it.

So put it as a plain question to the host: if my college rang you next year, who would answer and what would they confirm? Without a clear answer, treat the certificate as a record that you took part rather than a record of what you produced.

What do you need this internship to prove?

Settle this before you compare offers line by line, because it decides which of the six questions before it should carry the most weight. If you are building a case for a specific postgraduate course, you want a deliverable you can describe in an interview. If you need income now, the stipend terms come first. If you are filling a mandatory credit requirement, the paperwork outranks everything else.

Write one sentence describing what you want this internship to prove about you in six months, then read each offer against that sentence instead of against the other offer. Two roles that look alike on the page can rank a long way apart once you know which answer you will need to give later.

None of these questions has a single right answer for every reader. A paid 30 day government scheme and an unpaid four week placement with weekly feedback are solving different problems, and which one wins depends on what you already have.

If you have applied and heard nothing, the guide on what silence after applying means covers what to do before you write that offer off. The guide on making a small organisation read your application is the step before all of this, for when you do not yet have an offer in hand.