Ask HN: When is it too old to be an intern?

I went back to school recently for a 2 year master's degree in information science (think: UI/UX, data science, databases, statistics), and the program strongly recommends doing an internship at a tech company during the summer in between the years. However, I'm going to be 31 this year, and I assume most of my competition for the positions are going to be in the 18-22 range. Will managers at SV-type tech companies (probably younger than me) even look at my application? My background mostly linux sysadmin-ing and bioinformatics, looking to get into more analytic/statistical work like BI.

It's much more common than when you were 22. Career changes, diff tracks through school, all sorts of reasons why people want to do internships into late 20s and thirties since the recent recession.

Companies are still desperate for top talent, and for specialized skills at growing firms (tech) that's especially true. We have interns starting with us in the summer at http://www.thinkful.com/ (edtech) and two of them are in or finishing masters' in CS from Columbia.

As long as you're not being taken advantage of by a cheap employer I think internships are a great low risk way to try a job and career.

isn't it a matter of ambition? if you include apprentice in your dictionary, people still do it in mid-50s.

definition: less accountability, steep learning curve, short immediate economic returns.

i did it at 29 and it worked out well for me. many of the other interns were just out of college, but it didn't seem to matter that i was a bit older. after 3 months i got a full time position and stayed with the company for 4 years.

I've had 3 interns on my team since last summer. One is a bit older than a typical college student, I believe she's a 26 yo bioinformatics major.

I can only speak for myself, but I look for 1) definitely a student, so expectations of going perm don't hit us by surprise, 2) either not too far off from graduation or the ability to work part-time during school 3) interest in the work, has some tie-in w/ the direction they want for their career, and 4) open to the possibility of going full-time upon graduation.

I'd love to have someone making such a transition working w/ us, we actually might have a need coming up shortly. But then again, I'm 37, and we're in SoCal...

One word of caution - make sure the scope of work is locked down. A smaller company might see you as a cheap backup system admin resource since you have background in that (under the guise of "we wear many hats here"), but you really need on the job experience before going full-time in what you want to transition to.