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Summer Internships - The Good, and the Bad?
loquacious d asks: "This has been a spectacular summer for open-source student internships. Google funded a huge variety of open-source projects through the Summer of Code, including GCC-CIL and other improvements to Mono, new features and fixes for Gaim, and even new packages for Common Lisp. Joel Spolsky at Fog Creek hired four interns to produce a highly modified version of VNC called Fog Creek Copilot, and Paul Graham's new venture capital firm Y Combinator helped students create their own tech companies. What internships did people enjoy this summer, and which ones didn't work out so well? Which ones would you recommend to next year's applicants, and which should they avoid?"
Many companies are willing to take students iterns for the summer. I know of a couple of iterns at Sandia National Laboratories that did an amazing amount of software development. Local companies often have openings and are willing to work with people. Use your imagination and don't just try big name projects.
Ok, so maybe this should have been obvious. One of my internships ended up being for a company that eventually taught me only one thing; pick your jobs carefully. I picked a small company that had a programming internship, got picked up, and found out quickly that I was THE programmer. Turns out they do this regularly, and use the cheapest labor they can find to do their projects. In turn, the permenant staff which was less skilled was making 3 times as much while I worked my ass off and they played horse shoes outside during hot days.
Lesson learned?
1. Check out the capability of your employers, supervisors, and fellow employees just as they check you out.
2. Don't be afraid to ask LOTS of questions!
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
OK, and you did what?
"Google summer of code paid out a handful of students. That's it. It wasn't an internship. It is exploitation. Paying people very little money and getting more done from them."
The purpose of internships is for the interns to learn something working in a real world environment. They may only have the few skills they learned while in college and certainly aren't worth being paid much (as a rule of thumb). So, in a sense, almost all internships are exploitation by your definition.
Oh, and there are many many college students that have no interest whatsoever in working at Microsoft (because they have a conscience). Finally, IBM hires about twice as many interns per year as Microsoft (and they are actually paid pretty decently). So stick that up your micrsmurf pipe and smoke it.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
If its between lifeguarding and taking a crappy job in your field, I'd take the crappy job in your field.
I think that this is the biggest problem with how students select a summer internship.
The greatest aspect of a summer internship is that it's temporary. For three months you get great exposure to a field, with absolutely no strings attached. And so why not do something different from what you do day-in-and-day-out at school?
You don't need to do something as extreme as becoming a life guard. But if you're studying electrical engineering, see if you can get a position focusing on computer science. Maybe try out a consulting company. Focus on something that will enrich you -- not because it makes your resume stronger, but because it exposes you to what you typically don't see in class.
If you like it, fantastic. You've found something new that interests you, and if you choose, you can guide yourself towards that field. If you hate it, who cares? In three months it's over. At least you tried something new.
You hopefully learned a little bit about how to be a senior programmer in the real world. No one was there to hold your hand through the tough parts, you had to make architectural decisions with somewhat lasting ramifications, you had to deal with tough business realities.
This real-world experience will help you in the long run.
Oh, and there are many many college students that have no interest whatsoever in working at Microsoft (because they have a conscience).
You forgot to mention the fact that they're also naive as hell, too. There are few grown-ups in this day & age that would turn down a Microsoft job. Times are tough, and only the wealthy (in both time and money) can afford to have a conscience.
And if you think that IBM is a shiny, happy company, then I've got a story to tell you about when I worked there about 10 years ago and had to ask to go to the bathroom.
I don't respond to AC's.
The perverse unpopularity of Lisp is very frustrating. Even searching for Emacs Lisp packages turns up less current activity and more cobwebs than I'd have expected given Emacs's widespread use and Lisp's extraordinary power, and I've so far failed to get any of the GUI toolkits to work with SBCL or CLISP under Gentoo. I read mind-boggling and inexplicable opinions such as this and I wonder if Lisp is a case of pearls before swine in the computing world, but I do hope you're right about it attracting a lot of attention lately.
Last summer I did my internship in a major defense contractor as programmer, at the end of my internship the manager told me that I could start working on monday, but instead of starting I told them I had another semester to graduate, I'll come after I graduate and I went there as soon as I graduated. Unfortunately they did not need me anymore. I couldn't risk it being a part time student at that time and it cost me a wonderful job, not to mention I couldn't find a decent job by now. So my advice, if get an offer like that just take it , being a part time student is not a bad thing, your work experience is more valuable than your degree.
intern at a pretty large(think largest) financial institute. [...] and my awesome summer internship consisted of waiting around [...] some crippled website [...] the ones afraid to lose their jobs [...] streched it out to 10 weeks.
You may think you wasted your time. But now you have learned the impossible-to-believe truth about large companies, especially ones with very stable revenue sources. You didn't waste a summer; you saved yourself a few years plugging away at a crappy job right after graduation.
It kind of reminds me of the patronage system that existed between rich people and artists during the Renaissance. The artists (coders) get paid and have a good reason to do their very best work -- you know people are going to see the results, so you want it to be good engineering, not the rushed-together job you might do for a class where it only matters that it runs -- and the patrons get what they're paying for plus street cred.
There have been some frustrations, mostly having to do with taxes and verification of student status, but I've really enjoyed working with my mentor (even got to visit the Google campus on a recent trip to the Bay Area -- the food is as good as their webpage claims!) and will definitely apply again if they decide to renew the program.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.