Which is better for internships: NYU or Harvard?

The biggest practical tradeoff is location versus reach. NYU gives you unusually easy access to in-semester internships because you are in New York City, where students can commute to companies, startups, media organizations, nonprofits, hospitals, and finance firms during the week. Harvard, on the other hand, offers a broader all-around recruiting machine and an alumni network that tends to open doors nationwide and across many industries, even though Cambridge is less built around semester-time interning than Manhattan.

For sheer convenience during the school year, NYU has a real edge. Being in the city matters a lot when internships are part-time, hybrid, or network-driven, and many students build experience continuously across fall and spring. That can be especially useful in fields like media, entertainment, fashion, business, journalism, and some areas of tech and nonprofit work.

Harvard tends to be stronger when you look at overall internship access, prestige recruiting, and long-term portability. Employers across consulting, finance, government, research, public policy, and many tech and nonprofit spaces recruit heavily from Harvard, and the advising, funding, and alumni connections are deep. Even when internships are not physically nearby during the semester, Harvard students often have strong access to summer opportunities and structured recruiting pipelines.

A lot depends on field. If your goal is to stack frequent in-semester internships and use New York as part of your education, NYU is hard to beat.

So for internships alone, I would give Harvard the overall edge, while NYU wins on day-to-day access during the academic year because of its location.