<p>I am majoring in Computer Engineering. This will actually be my 2nd degree. That said, I work full time as my company is footing the bill for this degree. I am beginning to have increasing concern about internships. I want to know:</p>
<ol>
<li> How important are internships to job placement? Starting salary?</li>
<li> What types of impact will NOT having an internship, thus no real world experience, have on my prospects of finding a job?</li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>If the company is paying, aren’t you going to be expected to work there full time in the summers?</p>
<p>Its not a Co-Op. The company I work for gives tuition assistance. They give enough to cover in-state tuition so I don’t pay for tuition out of pocket.</p>
<p>Not having internships won’t matter. Why? Because you are already employed and have experience. The reason internships are so important for traditional students is because they need that job experience. It sounds like you already have that. Further, your company is paying for your degree so you will certainly be expected to return to that company when you graduate. You essentially have a guaranteed job! You don’t need internships. Full-time experience trumps internship experience anyway, so when you may some day want to change jobs, your full time job experience will be both better-looking than internships and more recent.</p>
<p>I would like to ask something in relations to this. How would REUs look to employers over internships. They aren’t exactly work experience. I am planning on spending all of my future summers doing REUs to perhaps get into a top grad school. But if by any chance it doesnt work out, I dont want to be out dry without any internships.</p>
<p>Internships (and co-ops) are important if you don’t have work experience in your field. They let you get your foot in the door with a company that might want to hire you later. Also, they let you preview the company and gauge your fit there. You don’t say what your current FT job is, so it might, or might not, give you experience appropriate to your long range career goals. </p>
<p>If you want grad school, it is nice to have some industry work experience but research experience is very important. If you do a summer REU, try to get at least a poster and presentation out of it along with a letter of recommendation from the PI. A publication would be better but is hard to do with just summer research. Whatever you do, you will need letters of recommendation (from employers, internship supervisors, research colleagues) when you apply to grad programs.</p>
<p>“1. How important are internships to job placement? Starting salary?”</p>
<p>Most would be more willing to employ someone who has had practical experience and has been actually working. Even better if you’ve been working on something that’s in line with what an employer is looking for. Studying IS NOT work and the work environment is TOTALLY different in operation. And employers know this precisely (that grads that don’t have work experience, don’t have practical experience practically at all and expect everything to work like in books). Therefore internships and work experience are the key to practical work, studying is just absorbing theoretical basis and practicing idealized scenarios.</p>
<p>“2. What types of impact will NOT having an internship, thus no real world experience, have on my prospects of finding a job?”</p>
<p>Well, basically if you haven’t had a job before (in the field/area you’re trying to get into), then you don’t know anything about the work world. You would have to be trained on the job and would be sluggish in adopting to how the workplace operates, that takes time. But if there’s a grad applying that has work experience, then of course he’s/she’s more appealing to the employer, because he’ll/she’ll likely adopt easier or brings life/work experience from another company.</p>
<p>And well, mostly new grads go through internships to find actual jobs, probably not many have something that makes them appealing employees straight out of school, but they all need some practical work experience in the form of internships first to make them appeal like they’re ready to work and know what the work life/environment is like.</p>
<p>I agree with the others. Internships are important for the traditional students with no work experience, to help in their job search. If you already have job experience that is at least slightly related to engineering, an internship wouldn’t bring much value.</p>