Interns
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You wouldn't think that it would take much to woo interns to Silicon Valley, especially for Google. My guess is that Google and Microsoft get to fight over the top candidates, and neither of them is really a loser. It's all the other companies out there that end up getting the less highly rated interns.
Which is cool with me. It would have given me lots of other choices if I were graduating 🙂
Still, how cool would it be to get to the Bill Gate summer BBQ while in college?
I had the chance to intern at Virginia Power a long time ago and it turned out to be a great experience. I was an EE graduate student at the time and ended up in the maintenance group learning how to schedule maintenance and giving input for work that was actually being done. Done by someone else, of course. It was, after all, a nuclear power plant. You can't have interns running around with wrenches tightening reactor bolts. It is rightie-tightie, right?
However I ended up moving over to the IT group and writing a scheduling application that my old department actually used to manage their work. I stayed in IT, switched to computer engineering, and the rest is history.
I think interning is a great idea and it gives you the chance to groom someone for your company. It's a chance for students to learn, do real work, and you to find out who fits and doesn't fit in your organization. And it brings a new perspective to your group, with the addition of someone that isn't set in their ways. After the recent Revisit What You Know, maybe that's a really good thing.
I think there are less IT people to choose from overall, especially as salaries stagnate a little and the layoffs continue, but there is still a demand for people that's hard to fill. If your company doesn't look to hire people right out of college, maybe they should.
PS - Support Katie and her family : Purchase a raffle ticket today for a chance to win some great prizes.
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I'm a whole-hearted advocate for interning. I had an internship right out of high school for a big name technology company in the local area, verifying datasheets against a database and writing a VB application to manipulate the data. That was my first experience with a database and what really fueled my interest in database programming. Then I took an internship with a local retailer, getting their financial systems Y2K compliant and learning a new language for the job. Then I had an internship with a big name real estate company, getting their application moved from Access-based to VB-based. My last summer of school, I was working for the university as a student worker, but I still put my skills to use and co-wrote an inventory program for them, using PHP and MySQL. Each internship gave me experience in various sectors, which helped me to see just how the stuff I learned in school would or wouldn't be used. It also gave me a feel for what kind of things go on in the field and solidified my interest in programming and databases. And it exposed me to office politics, something that a classroom couldn't give me.
I've told young kids - the ones still in high school - that if they really are interested in getting into a computing field, try to get internships to get exposed to the field. High schools around here have CCNA classes amongst other classes - let's put them to work and see if it's what they really want to do.
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Not quite the same as an internship, (we don't really have those here in the UK any more though my parents both did internships when they were my sort of age), but I did two weeks work experience for a company whilst at school. Then I got asked back to work there for the following summer holidays, purely because of what I did before, and I ended up working there for four summer hols in a row!
I would say that fortnight was what enabled my career to start, so they're incredibly useful if you pick the right company.
Paul
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I did the same company twice in grad school and ended up working for them, but I also did a couple in high school at different places (got lucky there).
I'd actually recommend trying 2 or 3 companies if you can. If more companies would take interns, it would be great for you to see different perspectives, maybe even *nix and MS shops and compare them!
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Several of the universities over this side of the pond have formal work-placement programmes as an inbuilt part of the course. A four year degree course could have 9-15 months spent working in a relevent industry, with pro-rata time for diploma/certificate courses. Work placement is organised formally via the institutions. Excellent way for the student to dip into an industry and prove their career choices. Good way also for employers to size up future recruits, keep in touch with college propectuses and also to hire young staff for defined projects.
It was good enough for me 20years ago....and it's been a proven formula for thousands others since then.
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I was a co-op student, which I guess is just about the same thing (at my school internships where not paid, co-ops where paid). It's a very low cost way for a company to size up some talent, and an excellent part of education IF the company actually gives you real work to do.
It was during my co-op as an aircraft underwriter I laid down the case for why Access was a bad choice for them as a database, although it worked amazingly well with 30 users for the first 6 months. Luckily when we hit that 6 month mark the MS SQL version was just a few weeks away. Seeing as I proposed the solution that foresaw what would happen I got hired on full time, and has been a DBA ever since... (12 years as of last week)
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