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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
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.
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'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!
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.
Interships really vary in pay.
I applied for several a few years ago when I was a junior in college.
Many payed 10-12$ an hour doing crap work. Others payed the better part of $20 and were still crap work.
Really depends on the company and the level of student they expect to get in.
I was 2.5 years in my college degree when I applied at a computer shop as an intern, this was in 2007. They offered me $4 an hour, UNDER THE TABLE. I laughed, grabbed my resume back out of the bosses hands and walked out. That was half of what minimum wage was.
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
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.