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?"

Comments

Internships are great

[smoondog]

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.

OutdoorDB - The outdoor Wiki

Interning overseas

[Carthag]

I am a Danish computer science student, currently interning for a small telecom/tech startup in South SF, working mostly on Java and frontend stuff. This is my first internship overseas.

It's a lot of fun to see the dynamics of such a small company (less than ten employees as compared to my previous employer which had 3000 in the main location).

I can warmly recommend trying it out! If it's not for you, hey you only wasted a couple of months, but you got a lot of experience and something nice to put on your resume. If you like it, well then you may even be a future hire!

I gotta admit though: Going back home in 3 weeks, I am starting to feel a bit of homesickness. Plus I miss public intoxication, oh God.

Intern at Sun Microsystems

[Thinthalion]

I'm an intern at Sun Microsystems this summer, working with the Java Swing team on look and feel oriented stuff. It's very interesting to work on such a huge project. I've also had the chance to talk at JavaOne. Overall it's an excellent and wonderful experience.

Summer TV

[FrankTheCrazy]

My internship was in front of my TV.

It was HORRIBLE. It didn't pay at all, it always seemed that I was unappreciated, and worst of all I was forced to do the same tasks over and over...

Avoid Cheap Labor Factories

[guaigean]

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!

Re:Avoid Cheap Labor Factories

[Herr Joebob]

a company that eventually taught me only one thing; pick your jobs carefully

If that's the only thing you learned, it was still well worth your time... :)

"even new packages for Common Lisp" - hey!

[starseeker]

Common Lisp has been attracting a lot of attention lately, compared to previous activity. Several of the Common Lisp projects funded were for the purpose of improving things like foreign function interfaces, and thus speed Lisp's popularity and utility even further.

There are a lot of applications written in Lisp that are special enough and powerful enough to justify lots of attention. For example:

ACL2 : http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/
This is a high powered proof assistant and IIRC was used by AMD to verify some parts of their chip design.

Maxima: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
This is a computer algebra system, with the ability to do things like symbolic integration. Not your run of the mill program, and very difficult to do except in a language like lisp or a similar language

Axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/
A second computer algebra system, with a slightly different approach than Maxima. Also extremely powerful, and is pushing the envelope of robust, literate program design for computational mathematics.

None of these has a pretty interface, granted (at least not one written in lisp) but these are not your everyday programs. Lisp is a real language in real, non-trivial use.

There are a variety of other projects being undertaken, check out http://common-lisp.net/ for many of them. And if you want to code lisp remember to explore SLIME+Emacs.

Re:"even new packages for Common Lisp" - hey!

[Wolfbone]

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.

Re:Summer of Code Pays Off

[chrisd]

Uh, that's 419 projects at $4500 a piece (plus $500 per student to the mentoring organization). That's not next to nothing and it is not a minimal investment, that's 2 million+

And that's a crapton of open source software.

Chris

Linuxbox

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Summer research

[qx128]

For anyone looking for good internships, I highly recommend undergraduate research. I found the experience to be quite fun and educational. This summer, I did some Linux kernel research and built an extension of the kernel. The project records system call information. (It's similar to the Linux strace utility, but with several important modifications.) During the spring, earlier this year, I started looking for a summer internship. I didn't find my school's career fair too helpful. Submitting a resume via email is also rather impersonal, and doesn't allow you to show an employer why they should hire you. If you want to find a good internship for the summer, getting in front of someone who can actually hire you is key. (As oppose to some human-resources person). Also, ask about the project(s) you'll be working on. Make sure it fits your interests. At the same time, keep some opportunities as backups, even if you're not that interested in them. I got my internship by going around to different professors, asking them what projects they were researching, and if they'd like any help on the project for the summer. Most universities post the professor's research-interests on the staff webpage for the department. That's a good place to start when looking for interesting projects.

Big companies can be a bit inflexible

[koreth]

My last couple years of in college I was an intern at Sun. I displayed some talent and found myself working on some projects that would normally have been given to much more senior engineers. All well and good: the work was interesting and challenging, I was getting exposed to lots of new technologies, and I got to see my stuff used in the real world.

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.

The Bad

[dj245]

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.

Intel Interships

[Aadain2001]

I'm currently in my seventh(7) internship at Intel. I'm lucky and got in on a very special program that takes local high school grads and gives them internships in design/manufacturing positions during the summers while in college. You have to be in a short list of majors (all technical of course) and maintain a high GPA.

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.

bad experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup tomorrow is my last day as an intern at a pretty large(think largest) financial institute.

I am a CS major, one semester left. Basically I am working with a team of developers and tech support(internal tech support) and my awesome summer internship consisted of waiting around for tech support to write up procedures so I could mark them up in html and post them on some crippled website. I was lucky it let me use css. The job should have taken a week max, but the ones afraid to lose their jobs by publishing their tasks streched it out to 10 weeks. About 3 weeks in I approached my manager(very hands off type of guy) and told him of the situation and asked if I could work with the developers in my many downtime hours.

Scheduled a meeting...

"Hey website looks great, content is key, make sure we get those procedures up"...walks away.

So I took it upon myself to offer my services to the developers, well, the project is so far ahead of schedule, the developers have no work for even themselves.

So, I waited out the summer, and tried to learn about my favorite new technologies, even started do top coder competitions during work.

And for those saying get research experience, i've also had bad luck with that. Pretty much since sophomore year, I have offered my time, for free, to every professor in my department. No interest. I applied to every REU site listed, got accepted by colorado, then rejected 3 days later.

Its not as easy as you people make it out to be.

Re:Good Iternships

[et764]

As one of those interns at Sandia National Laboratories, I can say it was an excellent experience. I learned a lot and got experience working with a software development organization that is very well organized. I got to meet some of the other interns, and have been really amazed by the breadth of work being done here. I've got some real world experience, something that looks good on my resume, and plenty of opportunities are opened up that I might not have had otherwise. Today I demoed the project I've been working on for my coworkers, and they were all very happy with it. I not only have a lot of experience to take away from here but I feel like I've also left behind something that will be useful for the people I've had the pleasure of working with for the last few weeks. And, in very non-Slashdot style, it looks like I got a girl out of it too :)

Re:Open Source?

[TedCheshireAcad]

I don't know who the "Open Source Interns" are, but I'd highly recommend an internship at Google.

Perks include:

• Free food that's delicious (and extra free, the 10 pounds you'll gain after being here for a month)
• A really freaking amazing workstation. Seriously. Going back to the workstations at school is going to suck
• All sorts of intern activities, ice cream socials, etc.
• Work on something meaningful! Interns here at Google aren't around to make copies and edit MS word documents. We write code, and LOTS of it. (Engineering interns at least, I can't speak for the MBAs and such)

...as I write this from my desk. Back to work we go! :-)

Microsoft was great (really)

[nconway]

I didn't intern for Microsoft this summer, but I've interned for them the past two summers, and I'd highly recommend it (especially for college students who have done some F/OSS hacking on the side, as those are exactly the kind of people I think will get a lot out of software design (SDE) intern position at MS). Perhaps the nature of the experience differs depending on the group you intern with, but I've interned with two very different groups and had enjoyable experiences both times. Also, I did a software design (SDE) internship; interning in project management or test would probably be a bit different, I'm not sure. Highlights:

• Interesting work. Interns typically work on a single project for the summer, and you usually get a degree of choice about what to work on. Both times I was given an interesting, challenging project. The nice thing is that your project isn't usually "port some code we don't care about from Platform X to Platform Y" or similar grunt work — it's actually interesting and relevant.
  
• Interesting, competent coworkers. I was pretty amazed at the quality of the full-timers at MS -- pretty much everybody I met who had a technical role was a pretty shit-hot programmer. But more important, everyone was a huge geek -- most people really loved what they were working on. That sense of enthusiasm was infectious; people actually enjoyed the work they were doing! Again, maybe it differs between product groups, but pretty much everyone I met was exactly the kind of person I'd imagine hacking F/OSS if they weren't working for MS (which is what I would have been doing, too).
  
• Nice campus, good pay. All the rest was pretty good pretty good -- the MS Redmond campus is pretty nice, the pay is pretty decent, Seattle weather in the summer was nice, etc. MS hire a lot of interns every summer (in the ballpark of 700-900 in Redmond, say), so there are lots of students in the same position as you to hang out with.
  

Obviously if you have a moral objection to working for Microsoft, then don't bother applying. But if that doesn't apply to you and you like hacking code, MS has been a great experience for me in the past.