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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?"
I once did an NSF funded REU internship and it was one of the greater experiences of my life. I met people I'm still friends with, I became a researcher in the area and I still do some of the things I learned then. I highly recommend them, they also are great for the resume when finding a job, when I hire now, internships make a difference. Obviously at the undergraduate level is an excellent time to do this, although many CS/engineering grad students do this successfully. Bio grad students not so much.
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Tomorrow will be the last day of my 5th summer internship at Sandia Labs . I haven't worked anywhere else so I can't really compare, but I thought it was pretty enjoyable expereince overall. I did alot of web programming (mainly asp and PL/SQL web toolkit). Being a CS major, I found this job more suitable someone with an MIS background, but for 17.50 an hour I wasn't going to complain. I could have requested to get moved to another job, but I was too lazy. Now it seems that they want to hire me full time once I graduate. It's a very laid back environment here. You can pretty much come in whenever you want, and leave when ever you want. My manager was really cool, he never got on my case about anything. It's operated by the federal government so you know they are gonna push back the deadline for projects almost every time. The catch is to get a job at Sandia, you usually need some contacts working on the inside for you. If you can your foot in the door with Sandia, you will most likely be in good hands.
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I have an internship (for another week) at The Linux Box (linuxbox.com). I love it. Great people to work with. Get to work on Open Source projects. Learned a LOT. Great atmosphere, it was even paid!
I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a summer internship.
Then I graduated. I was enjoying working at Sun, so I decided to stay there. Since I wasn't an intern any more, they gave me a promotion -- to the lowest entry-level rung on the technical job ranking ladder, the only place their HR rules would allow me to proceed from an internship. On its face that might not seem unreasonable, but even before graduation I was already doing the work of people two or three ranks higher.
Okay, fine, I figured, I'm sure I'll get promoted up to an appropriate level before long. Nope! Once again, Sun's HR rules kicked in: it's not possible to promote people at more than a certain rate. I would have to stay for several years before my job title and pay matched the work I was doing.
Still, I liked working there, so I got over the annoyance and plugged away for a while.
A year or so later, I got a job offer from a small company for about 40% more money than Sun was paying me, plus a decent chunk of equity, to do work that was just as interesting. My manager at Sun couldn't match the money; he had already maxed out my salary for the pay grade I was in, and HR wouldn't let him promote me for another 6 months or so. I took the offer, and I've never worked at another big company since.
Now, I don't regret my time at Sun, but I guess the moral of the story is, keep your eyes open and make sure you don't get sucked so far into the first interesting place you work that you miss out on other opportunities. It's a fluid job market out there.
My advice would be that if you're a student, you NOT avoid any internship in your field! Any experience will be greatly beneficial in helping you get your next internship / real job. If its between lifeguarding and taking a crappy job in your field, I'd take the crappy job in your field.
My first internship in my field paid $6/hour. Halfway through the summer the funding ran out under the internship account (Was for 250 hours only) and they kept me on. At $10/hour (nice pay raise for 2.5 months work). The next year I was graduating and I was getting ready to call them and find out if I could do it again since I wasn't having any luck finding a job. They called me first. Money ran out in 2.5 months again. They kept me on at $12.50/hour. A few months later I was highered as a full time employee with benefits and all.
Low paying internships can turn into full time jobs. So yes, definitely take any internship in your field. Even if it only pays minimum wage (or even nothing at all in some cases).
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I'm studying ME and did an internship in a Power station. I think this picture about sums it up. A co-worker held the hopper hatch door shut with a broomhandle whilst I carefully opened it and got the hell out of there. My advice- check out your employer before you get into anything. If they have a history of not treating employees right, stay away.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Overall, they were great! Each year I was somewhere else, but mainly in design since that is where my interest lies. I got to work on Prescott, Cedermill a bit, etc. Great exposer to what it's like being an engineer.
My project last summer though was the best. My supervisor didn't treat me as just a lowly intern or throw a project that he was just kind of interested in. He treated me like a coworker and had me working on his person pet project (which succeeded beyond even his wildest dreams!) and it was very challenging and rewarding.
Intel treats its interns very well and rewards hard work. As they say around here, you get out what you put in. If you sit around not doing much and never leaving your cube (hehe, like me this summer), you don't end up doing much. But if you get out and talk to engineers and ask for work and take the initiative you get interesting work and a lot of respect.
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It's a far more interesting project than CoPilot, for two reasons. First, the people making it are actually going to own the business. Second, the thing they're making isn't scheduled for obsolence in the next three years, as CoPilot is (when MS releases Longhorn with an RA feature).
I figure that I can't be the only political science nerd on slashdot, so I'll post about some good polisci internships - my apologies if this is too far off-topc.
I've spent the past few months interning in the Governor's Citizen Services office in New Hampshire. I'd highly recommend it for anyone in-state - you work with a good, small group of people, and much of the work is interesting. Yah, you do a lot of data-entry and phone-answering, but there's also interesting research work if you want it. I've written summaries of several state bills - I even briefed the Governor on one. The only real downside is that there is *no* possibility of getting paid - check to see if your school offers summer grants. Oh - and there often aren't enough computers to go around. Bring a laptop, get used to working in the state library, or think about "telecommuting" on research-heavy days.
In the spring semester, I interned with COLEAD in Washington - the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad. It's a two-person advocacy group that tries to coordinate NGOs that want Congress to spend more money on foreign affairs. This is *not* a "mover and shaker* internship, but it's educational -of necessity, you end up learning a lot about NGOs and the cognressional budgetary process.
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Most probably you're trying to be funny. But I do highly recommend a Microsoft internship. An intern there does pretty much the same kind of work as a full-timer, the work you do has real impact on the products they ship, and you get to work with very smart people.
If you're interested you can find more about it here
I'm currently an intern in Japan. My job isn't as glamorous as some but getting the opportunity to live and work in a different culture has been a great experience. I have not been translating Japanese->English thank you, just a typical power engineer job. Some other interns I know are working with robotics and if that's your thing then there is no better place in the world. I'll be here for another 10 months but JETRO internships can be as little as 4 months. Just don't expect to be paid much.
Then why did IBM tell me there weren't really any internship slots open, only co-ops, while I got an internship at Microsoft? And you can't possibly be implying that Microsoft doesn't pay decently.
Give me a break.
Usually, the real-world lessons you learn include: identify who will take advantage of you; identify people you can trust for assistance; discover that you misjudged your boss' penchant for sadism; salaries sometimes seem to have precious little to do with who does the real work; everything costs even more than in school; HR is going to screw up your paperwork; etc. You'll learn all of them equally well whether you intern for Google, Microsoft, or Septic-Kleen.
John
If I'm being exploited, then damn, being exploited is kind of nice. I'm being paid to work on a project for an organization that I want to see succeed. I get to work whatever hours I want instead of being forced into a 9 to 5 schedule. This allows me to take classes and do my Summer of Code project at the same time. I also get to do something that's meaningful to me, instead of IT gruntwork or whatever an normal company would have me doing. I use open source software myself, and I've been looking to get involved. Now I have my foot in the door. My project will be used by (at least) hundreds of thousands of people come October when the next Ubuntu release goes out. I think that's pretty nifty. To top it all off, I get paid to do this. The money Google is giving is more than many of the internships I looked at, so I don't know why you're saying it's very little money.
I know that saying bad things about Google is the in thing these days to make yourself look like a free-thinker, but there's absolutely no way you can twist their Summer of Code program into a bad thing.
Perks include:
That actually sounds a like like IBM Austin today...well maybe we're not *completely* nuts, but the dress code, the people and their attitudes are still like that.
I'm not an intern (those days are behind me), but I've known a bunch over the years and they still go do lots of crazy stuff outside work.
On another note, I've heard stories of interns working insane hours in the lab, but since they're paid by the hour (and making some serious overtime money) they were making more than us full-timers...
I have an internship at Anheuser-Busch Fort Collins brewery and I couldn't of ask for anything better! The pay is amazing the experience is intense! I go home everyday mentally exhausted! I assist with everything from Dbase servers/Network Sys/Sys Analysis/Phon Sys/Hardware Repair/Production line/you name it I have had a chance to work with it. I would definatley recommend a internship at AB if you have the chance!