Many colleges are now giving students a chance to get a look at a star-studded career by offering Hollywood internships.

Many popular US colleges and universities, particularly from the East Coast and the South, are offering new and improved internships in places such as Los Angeles, according to an article by The Boston Globe.

Among the colleges that sponsor yearlong and summer programs in Southern California include Emerson College in Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Boston University, Ithaca College in New York, Columbia College in Chicago, Temple University in Philadelphia and Elon University in North Carolina.

Most students in these internships focus on classes in screenwriting, acting and agentry, and most of the internships in television, film, music or advertising are unpaid. Many of the programs mock overseas programs by bringing in students from out of town and creating a whole new experience.

"We joke that we are in a foreign country here," Bill Linsman, who heads Boston University's six-year-old Los Angeles Internship Program, said in the article. "Many of the students are from the East Coast, and Los Angeles' entertainment business is a foreign culture."

Usually most of the students in the internship programs stay in the Los Angeles area if it is their final semester before graduation, and often join large networks of alumni already working in the entertainment field.

"It really does immerse you immediately into what's going on here and gives you a real sense of how to break into the industry," Jeff Bibeau, an Ithaca College senior, said in the article. "It would be silly of me to study four years of communications in upstate New York, cut off from the rest of the world."