A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
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Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#2You're totally spot on Alexey, as usual. Referrals are king...according to our data at Meeteor.com, every person in your network is connected to 200 people across 20 different industries. Pretty powerful stuff - chances are the job you're looking for is just a friend away.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#3I didn't see this on there, so let me add: There is no reason, in the year 2012, for a CS or engineering student to take an unpaid internship. Depending where you go, you can expect over $20/hour as a student intern--if you're doing work of real value, you deserve to be paid!
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#4I'll add that if you do multiple internships, do them at multiple places. At this point in your career, getting breadth of experience is far more valuable than depth.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#5I didn't see this on there, so let me add: There is no reason, in the year 2012, for a CS or engineering student to take an unpaid internship. Depending where you go, you can expect over $20/hour as a student intern--if you're doing work of real value, you deserve to be paid!
...really? It's not about the money..it's about the experience. Granted, an internship that pays you + gives you the experience you're seeking is a jackpot, but I would always rank experience over money.
I worked 20 hours a week in college (and my summers) mostly for free, and I don't regret a second of it. Learned more through those opportunities than anything that would have paid me.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#6I'll add that if you do multiple internships, do them at multiple places. At this point in your career, getting breadth of experience is far more valuable than depth.
That's completely true. Versatility opens so many more doors than depth.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#7I really like the "try to have at least two internships: one at a small start-up and one at a tech company" sentiment. Internships aren't just for your resume, they're for you to figure out what areas in the business you like and to gain a variety of skills and experiences.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#8I didn't see this on there, so let me add: There is no reason, in the year 2012, for a CS or engineering student to take an unpaid internship. Depending where you go, you can expect over $20/hour as a student intern--if you're doing work of real value, you deserve to be paid!
...really? It's not about the money..it's about the experience. Granted, an internship that pays you + gives you the experience you're seeking is a jackpot, but I would always rank experience over money. I worked 20 hours a week in college (and my summers) mostly for free, and I don't regret a second of it. Learned more through those opportunities than anything that would have paid me.
I'm coming here from a slightly different angle, as a computer engineer, but here's how I see it.
If you're going to work at a tiny little startup of 2-3 people, maybe they can't pay you. Of course, maybe they shouldn't be hiring interns at that stage of the game. I worked as an intern for a startup that size, though, and they still paid me $15/hour.
If you're working somewhere larger, it only makes sense that they should pay you if you're doing work of value. Telling you it's all about the experience is like that oft-told story where clients want web designers to work for free, because it's "good exposure" and will "expand your portfolio".
As an intern, I've laid out, soldered, and debugged PCBs, designed and assembled test equipment setups, made fiber optic cables, tested cameras for surveillance drones, re-written UIs to use WPF, done significant kernel hacking, and published several papers, among other things. All of these tasks generated value for my employers, and it only makes sense that they should pay me for it.
That's just my 2 cents, though.
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#9I didn't see this on there, so let me add: There is no reason, in the year 2012, for a CS or engineering student to take an unpaid internship. Depending where you go, you can expect over $20/hour as a student intern--if you're doing work of real value, you deserve to be paid!
...really? It's not about the money..it's about the experience. Granted, an internship that pays you + gives you the experience you're seeking is a jackpot, but I would always rank experience over money. I worked 20 hours a week in college (and my summers) mostly for free, and I don't regret a second of it. Learned more through those opportunities than anything that would have paid me.
Do you think you'd have learned less at a paid internship?
Re: A brief guide to Tech Internships for CS students
#10I'll add that if you do multiple internships, do them at multiple places. At this point in your career, getting breadth of experience is far more valuable than depth.
Can't agree enough. For me, internships were largely about being able to say "Okay, now I know I don't want to do that." Places I interned:
* Quigo (acquired by AOL) twice, before and after freshman year
* AMD, after sophomore year
* Goldman Sachs (as a developer), after junior year
* Microsoft, between the two years of my MS
* NASA, while doing my MS
I'm not trying to name drop, but to point out that I optimized for diversity and to emphasize how valuable this was. I worked for a startup (at two different sizes), an EE company, a bank, a big software company, and as an researcher at a government agency. Ultimately this helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school (work on my startup, then go to Google). I could easily have ended up doing something miserable (like going to Goldman - which would be miserable for me, at least) if I hadn't sampled so widely.