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What Can I Expect As an IT Intern?
p3np8p3r writes "I'm in college and working towards my Bachelors in Computer Science. Last year I passed both my CompTIA A+ and Network+ certifications and now have been offered (via a staffing company) a full-time Internship at a wireless lab of a major laptop manufacturer. The pay is going to be around $8 an hour full-time but that is not my primary motivator. I'm considering this significant decrease in pay from my previous (non-IT) job to be counterbalanced by what valuable knowledge I may gain both in the technical aspects and industry insight while I finish school. This field is all new to me and I don't personally know anyone who has worked in it before who will give me their honest opinions on it. Although I know circumstances differ greatly, in general, what can I expect as an IT Intern? What have been your experiences?"
I developed some software on my own when I was in school which allowed to get known. I then did my internship at full salary (20$ an hour back then) for a small company. A "major laptop manufacturer" might seem a little cheap at 8$ an hour even for an internship.
Have you looked for company to do your internship by yourself? It could be important to do your internship in a place that will fit to your career plan, ask questions and talk to the company representatives. In short, don't view your internship as just another academical formality in order to get your bachelor degree. Don't go work there as a governmental clerk just doing another day ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
And have worked here about 2.5 years now, including my year as an intern. It was alot of fun, and I learned an immense amount.
Plain and simple, kiss your bosses ass. If your lucky enough to be liked, you may end up getting a job offer when your hired, and in this economy, you'd be considered lucky.
Expect to be doing alot of grunt work. Your coworkers are going to use you as a "gopher". Don't take it personally, but also be insistant on wanting to learn their jobs, not just get their coffee. Alot of people are going to be afraid to give you an indepth look at what they do, their afraid if someone else knows their job, they'll be fired. This not much you can really do about it, besides just pick up what you can from the sidelines.
Be outgoing, and don't slack. If that means working through lunch everyday, it'll be worth it in the end when you come away with a better knowledge of whats going on.
Try to ask intelligent questions. You'll catch people off guard and look alot more intelligent by asking "How could I use cat and grep in order to do..." instead of "Whats grep?"
The reason why payment is important for IT people is because your pay is proportional to how interesting your job is. Academia excepted. If you are only paid $8/hour, expect to keep doing $8/hour tasks. Like brewing coffee, boring testing work and stuff like that. On the other hand if you were paid $80/hour, you wouldn't have to do any of that because your time would be way to expensive to be wasted on such menial tasks.
Football Odds
Expect to be told to stop all that substituting letters for numbers crap.
P.S. What is pateper?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dude,
read Dilbert to get more insight into the Industry then you ever wanted.
Also you may want do have a look at Userfriendly, Hackles and early Reallifecomics.
Maybe all this wisdom can help you picture, where you are going.
For your Internship, be ready to be the *** of the Company.
Do not stop looking for more internship opportunities.
...is that typical? Here in Oz the federally mandated minimum hourly rate for any worker is roughly $12.50US/hr.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's what happened to me. I eventually quit and went into health care; still do IT work on a volunteer basis. I now make good money but seeing misery all the time is beginning to have an effect on me.
Folks, you never know there is tons of suffering till you are working in a hospital. At that point you praise God for what you have.
I really have to wonder about the pay level. I can still remember what my first intership paid: $7.37 an hour -- in 1986.
I'm working as a consultant developer. Been offered to be "Technical lead", but I didn't want to commit to "one company" or end up "jobhopping".
At HQ they offered me to become a "sales & marketting"-guy but it felt it would be too boring, even let a big ass car sit on the driveway of the company which would come with the job.
Then I got an offer to be an account manager and fly across Europe and on and off to Canada for networking and representing their product and creating technical requirement documents, but my current commitments and professional strategy would collide and I'd give up something I've build up.
So what's my point here? I'm still in the "god-forsaken-hellhole called IT" and love it. People see potential in me which reflects in the "offers" they throw at me, yet I don't bite just because it's "something else" or "pays more". I believe you love IT or you don't. If you don't, drop the keyboard and stop writing messy code or creating self-"jobsecurity". If things aren't the way you like them, try to fix them, be verbal and communicative or find another place to work (as long you take crap, you'll be given crap. Management will use the same tricks you're teaching them in your behaviour that work; if you get productive after you've been humiliated and shouted at for an hour, compared to an investment of 1,5 hours of "backpadding", you'll be humiliated and shouted at, it's more efficient and it works. In psychology that's simple operand conditioning.).
Its personal attitude and ability which makes the difference between a "sucking job" or a "challenging job". It's not about grabbing money and sitting out 8 hours a day, it's almost half of your waking time in the week. Why not make something of it and put yourself into it?
This kid wants to learn, his attitude will ultimately be noticed and if he's good and delivers doors will open. And they'll stay open as long he's respectful to the people that pay him and he's working with. What he can expect? I could write hours on what he could expect, but the most important thing is to experience it himself and find a way which makes sense and has meaning to himself to manoeuvre himself in that enviromnent. His ability to do so will create his personally defined success or not. There's no static or predetermined way to achieve that and no "add water and stir"-recipe. That's the beauty of the challenge (of life in general), to me; it's a playground. Go play and do whatever has meaning to yourself and you feel or think you have to do in order for it to meaningful for yourself.
I don't want to overly romanticize it, I have my days of misery as well, but it teaches me alot about myself and how to operate in a certain situation or environment. Those "negative emotions" are just red flags and indicators to me to make a change, and a clear choice wherever I'll allow myself to feel as miserable or define a way or plan to get it resolved, by being self-critical, asessing the situation or trying to identify the rootcauses. Even if it's my own idiocy or attitude which becomes resolvable once I'm having enough overview to notice and admit it.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
...and you're tied to that post in the middle of the office with everyone baying for blood about their lack of access to youtube or joke emails and you're about to receive the cat 'o nine tails, make sure you take up the offer of hard leather or wood to bite down on.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Minimum pay here is €8.65 (=$10-$12) per hour. It's a bit like a football apprentice. Hundreds start, but few make the top team. Use whatever chances you get to shine, and learn stuff. Some come through, most go away. Learn to lick ass. Try not to have the breakdown before you're 30. Keep your eye on job ads.
I had an internship at one of the National Labs (think Los Alamos/Laurance Livermoor). I was exposed to more in my first week on the job than I had been with two years of schooling. If you work in a data center, your main job will be running cables. That is just how it is going to be. When you aren't running cables, talk to people, find out if there is anything you can help with. Make informed comments, google what your peers are talking about, and if you can find papers that they've written....READ THEM. Soak up as much as you can, that is why you personally are there is to learn. On their end, yes you are are the lowest paid member of their staff and will be doing the dirty jobs.
WTF?
Stalker behaviour! Figure people out on your own like a big boy. Asking about and then looking up retired engineers is creepy and weird. Besides which, different people find different things difficult to deal with. Those retired engineers might be social misfits and you might not. Or vice versa.
$8/hr !?!!?!
Have things really gotten THAT BAD in the US??? Wow...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The way I see it, if your time is worth no more than $8 an hour, then knock yourself out. Just another reason I'm getting out of this field, there's just too many people in it who do not value their own time.
"Once you go to married life, you'll never put serious effort into furthering your technical career again."
Contrary anecdote: I quit my my factory job and started studying for my BSc aged 29, two school aged kids and a wife. Taxi driving and the wife's cleaning job paid the bills. However I'm not from the US, uni fees were paid via a modest tax increase after I graduated.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In Belgium all Bachelor IT studies have an intership in the last half year or year before graduating.
They're unpaid, though included in your schooling so no harm done there. In most of the cases the interns are hired as full employees. For companies this just is common sense. They shorten the official trial period a new employee has to go through by the duration of the intership.
The company where I work now I was able to get promoted a year before schedule, and since I worked here 3 interns were hired as employees, 2 more interns will start in Q1/2010 and those will likely be hired when they finish their internship (assuming they don't screw up ;))
I don't know about the US of course, but taxes on employees is ridiculously high in Belgium, so a 3 or 6 months free employee is a great way to start their training and put them on new projects where the technology still has to be discovered. This then gives the intern a step up on other people as they spent their internship exploring and working with the new technology, without being bothered by a full planning with regular work on clients.
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
Sys Admin jobs in banks are very boring. But you earn more than most IT people.
Research jobs are very interesting (I was tangentially involved in some in my early years) but you are paid peanuts.
At the end you have to use common sense, be realistic about what you want and be willing to compromise in some aspects in order to achieve what you want (if you want money don't whine about a well paid albeit boring job).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At my work (3M - number 7 on here: http://www.ratemyplacement.co.uk/), we get our IT interns to generally come in and do support / content management related activities to begin with, but with the expectation that they'll move beyond that after 2-3 months and then spend 20-40% of their time doing project work equivalent to what a new graduate / any other employee would do. In recent years we've had interns working on developing website translation software that they proposed themselves (saving us several hundred thousand dollars per year), software license management / reduction and loads of other things.
Find out from the company at the start whether they're expecting you to have an open-ended project activity or whether you really are just the tea boy / doing incident management / desktop support. Emphasise to them that the internship you're looking for is a key part of your education and also your decision as to whether you would consider a graduate position with them. Companies spend a fortune on recruiting grads, so if we can just hire the interns we've had once they've graduated, it saves us time, money and potentially the disaster of hiring an unknown who turns out to be useless.
--- Band: Joey Ultra
...to shut up and get me my coffee.
Actually, thanks to the recession, you have thousands of young people paying search firms to get into internship programs that pay $0 an hour (for instance, this story).
As I wrote in to a magazine recently, the interesting thing about the recession is that it started for young people long before the housing crash in 2008. Wages were dropping like a rock for our parents too, but they could keep afloat with home equity loans until the entire system unravelled. 20-somethings, on the other hand, almost never have a home of their own and thus no home equity. The best the new BA grads could manage was to use grad school as a way to delay entering the real world, and a strikingly high percentage of them have done just that, running up massive student loans in the process.
I am officially gone from
Day 1 you'll likely have to spend several hours scrubbing an executive's PDA to ensure that his wife doesn't find out he's banging two fo the gals in accounting and marketing. He'll then berate you on how slow and useless you are.
Day 2 you'll likely spend 4 hours in a vendor meeting listening to your boss and the sales rep talk about where they want to go golfing and setting up a "tech demo" in that city. He'll promptly buy whatever nonsense the sales rep is hawking with a wink and a "Happy Ending" to the deal.
Day 3 you'll sit in a meeting with senior management bitching about costs and how worthless the IT\MIS department is and how they need to outsource to cut costs.
Day 4 You'll either start drinking or smoking to cope with the sheer amount of bullshit.
Day 5 if your smart you quit, if you are an idiot you'll spend 10 years doing IT work then finally quit.
Day 6 You've joined the dumb-ass catagory and decided to stick with it. You'll be asked to set up a Squid proxy solution so a smarmy ass-hat of a manager can try and find reasons to fire the three people that actually work so her neice can get one of the three now vacant jobs. You'll spend hours pouring through log files after hours trying to find a single inapporpriate web site so they can fire some people.
Day 7 You'll notice there isn't a mention of a weekend. That is because you will be stuck in a telco-closet tone testing wires and labeling thousands of connections because the wiring contractors never labeled anything because it is one of the executives cousins business that got the job so at Christmas Mr. Exec get 1/2 the profits from the job in his stocking...
Only an idiot or someone into S&M gets into IT anymore. Go work at Burger King, the co-workers are nicer, the manager are at least honest when it comes to treating you like cattle, and there is better career advancement.
Otherwise get ready to be treated like a fucking pesant, at least that's the general feel here in MN.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You're getting a bachelor's in CS, so why in the world would you want to work IT? There is a huge difference between programming and IT work. IT guys administer servers, troubleshoot workstations, fix network issues, replace busted hardware, and so on. Programmers create the software that the company sells to make money. Think about that and what it implies for a second. You're not going to use your CS degree in an IT job. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on IT; both IT guys and programmers are invaluable to a company... I just don't understand why you would waste a CS degree doing what amounts to grunt work for nothing. Given that you've invested the time, money, and mental effort to get a CS degree, I think you'll find something with the words "software", "programmer", "coder", and/or "architect" in the job title/description to be much more rewarding for you financially, professionally, and creatively.
Look I'm going to be frank here...lots of places put CS people on helpdesk, or on tickets - which is just the programmers helpdesk ;-).
If you want to impress me, come up with an idea that will improve something in a noticeable way. i.e. A script that avoids one of the more time consuming problems we have. Write a proof of concept on your own time. Then show it to me. On my team this would easily earn you a written recommendation and I would certainly give preference to you on subsequent work-terms. If I had an entry-level position - you'd also be a first round candidate. Even if your boss *does* none of those things - at least you have something with tangible results that you've done for a IT firm which you can put on your resume.
My suggestions, other than seek another industry, is to read, read, read, shoulder surf your leads and build your own test box(es) to play with.
I've been in IT nearly 26 years. I started as "the computer guy" at an optometry in my home town. It consisted of one PC and three dumb terminals running off that. I then sold electronics at Sears while I was in college (not for IT degree) and played with computers on the side. I then worked at a computer rental shop where we simply loaded OSes and wiped computers as they came and went. Finally I landed a desktop support job, tailed/helped the server guys in my spare time and then had enough experience to become a server administrator. Now I've specialized in Windows and VMware. I like where I work, but I hate the lack of satisfaction of my job. I came into IT for the technical work, the challenge of figuring out problems and to not deal with people. Now my job is 90% administrative - planning changes, talking with 12 different teams/managers to get approvals, documentation so managers understand what is happening - about 2 weeks' of clerical work, all so I can do 1hour of actual work late at night or on the weekend as I miss time with my family.
Point is you are starting down a long road. If you are willing to take on extra work constantly, continually read current and new technology, constantly study and test for certifications, you might be in a comfortable position in 5-7 years.
If you have any family or social life, add 5 years to this as IT is designed for single people with no lives. It helps if you can pack light and depart for travel quickly. It also helps if you can survive on 2 hours of sleep a day.
If I had it to do all over again, I'd go into carpentry, cooking or health care. Anything but IT.
Back when I was in university, the engineering department used to offer their students(and some of the CS students as well) the ability to take a semester at 1 credit and still maintain full time status(so you didn't lose health insurance or start having to pay back student loans). I think they were called co-ops or something like that. Essentially you'd work a summer and one semester for a company. That meant you weren't buggering off by the time you actually learned how to do the job and so you got paid fairly reasonably and actually learned something. They were actually a graduation requirement for the engineering students. I didn't do any personally, but I know a lot of people who did and found a lot of value in it.
There are some fairly decent internships, but you've got to be fairly careful. Companies generally won't get any real value out of an intern(which is why interns in most disciplines work for free), and so only a company which is really serious about investing in students will give you anything worthwhile to do(since it'll cost them money and productivity).
Add to that the fact that A+, Network+ and CompTIA are basically meaningless certs that a monkey could pass(no offfense), and you've probably just landed yourself an underpaid stint on the help desk. Maybe you've been lucky, but an internship will only help your future if you do something interesting and real with it, or if you can make some contacts for post graduation. If it's not going to do either of those things, enjoy your summer or work at a job which will actually pay you.
Abuse?
Long hours doing the impossible for the unappreciative?
A view of corporate life from the bottom?
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