<p>Are Computer Science summer internships easy to find? Do companies contact the college career center and/or CS departments for students to work? As a parent, should I relax with the feeling that my son's university will have many internships available to apply or should parents help with the networking factor? With all the talk about the weak job market, and reading about parents paying for companies to find their kids summer internships, I wonder if finding summer work is easier for CS students. Thanks so much.</p>
<p>Our DD had many interviews at her school’s career fair. She’s had half a dozen or more (I’ve lost count) second interviews. She’s had three offers for internships so far. She’s a freshman in CS. H & I have only provided encouragement and support throughout this process. I wouldn’t say I am relaxed but I definitely am thrilled she chose a great school that has provided her with so many opportunities.</p>
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<p>There are many listed in different places.</p>
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<p>It depends on the college.</p>
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<p>Have your student find out from career services or the CS department how many internships they had listed last year. If you have a networking connection, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Be aware that many CS internships have a minimum gpa required - sometimes 3.0, sometimes 3.2, sometimes 3.5.</p>
<p>MDCISSP,
Has your son changed his intended major? I thought he was initially interested in accounting or possibly actuarial science? Is CS a new interest for him?</p>
<p>Certainly it never hurts to use connections to suss out possible available internships, but the schools themselves have the broadest internship resources. Your student needs to get familiar both with the school’s career office and also with his department…a lot of internships come from professors and their connections.</p>
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<p>Research Internships are relatively easy to find but they can be competitive. Some places receive a lot of applicants and some places have trouble attracting applicants.</p>
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<p>Some companies may work with the career center to list their positions. Some may just send postings to professors or department heads which then get forwarded through the department’s email.</p>
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<p>Some universities do a great job or just attract recruiters because of their name. Some have coop and internship programs set up for their students. There are schools that don’t do that much for you too.</p>
<p>If opportunities at your son’s university are good, then perhaps just a reminder to get applications in might be fine.</p>
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<p>I would say that it is.</p>
<p>Perhaps you heard that Google was giving a company-wide 10% raise to avoid poaching from other companies like Facebook. 8 years ago, Google was poaching employees from my company. We are regularly hiring CS grads.</p>
<p>S has been recruited by two companies for summer positions through his involvement in a CS program. Heard from another one via a listserve he participates in. Another company called his school’s CS department and asked for names. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all recruit on his campus and post in the career center. Finding a summer position with programming skills has never been a problem, and they are fairly well-paying gigs, to boot – even the summer job programming for a professor. He has been able to pay summer rent plus put money in the bank.</p>
<p>My son told us that internships after juriior year are common, but that even sophomores usually don’t get them yet. He did get summer jobs with Silicon Valley companies after soph. and jr. years but only through interviews with companies coming to his college.</p>
<p>Most freshmen we know, including many who were later extremely successful, still waiter or mow lawns or whatever.</p>
<p>It never occurred to me to get involved, but that is also because I have no idea when it comes to CS.</p>
<p>My son had internships his sophomore and junior summers. Neither required interviews.</p>
<p>A coworker’s son (CS major) had a local internship with IBM after his freshman year.</p>
<p>There are a fair number of companies in the area that do software engineering that would prefer local students for internships and that may play a factor in what is available.</p>
<p>S1 has found that interviewing at larger companies hiring CS folks takes several rounds; 2-3 phone interviews, first with HR, then a general CS person, then a group phone interview with experienced CS folks where he is asked to tackle programming problems on the spot; after all that, then he goes to the location. </p>
<p>Programming job with the prof was done via a resume and a couple of emails. Had a job by October of freshman year, and we didn’t know til it was a done deal. </p>
<p>One thing S learned is that if one is doing an internship, don’t be the only CS person in the group, even if you are a fairly competent programmer. Make sure there are resources and people who can help you learn. S worked on a one-time project for my boss when he came home for holidays and breaks, and we have no other CS folks in the office. There are things he struggled with that would have been easy to work through with another, more experienced programmer on board. Even having someone who was able to explain what we wanted in a clear and competent way would have been helpful. He wrote an incredibly involved fund pricing program and then had trouble linking it to our various external proprietary database sources. Boss did not want to pay our software vendor for the time it would take one of their folks to help S get through the database linkage.</p>
<p>If a CS student is handy with hardware and networking, there are lots of smaller businesses that would be glad for temporary help.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your responses. Sounds like the best thing is to encourage my son to ask his CS professors for any internship leads and to work with the college career center.
Also, have the impression that a good CS student should be able to find a summer internship.</p>
<p>If he wants a research internship, he might start looking at REUs soon.</p>
<p>There’s the variable of the particular college and location in this. For my kids, there were a fair number of companies recruiting on campus for internship positions. In a nutshell, there are the following for internships - </p>
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<li>Companies recruiting on campus - which company and how many will vary with the campus</li>
<li>Companies with positions but not recruiting on campus - one must approach the company for a position</li>
<li>Profs offering positions in the companies they own</li>
<li>Profs offering positions on-campus (usually more of a job than a traditional internship)</li>
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<p>By ‘companies’ I’m including the government since the government has many internship opportunities as well.</p>
<p>If your S goes to college away from your home town but he wants to live at home in the summer then he can approach some local companies about positions. He doesn’t need to wait for a company to come to campus.</p>
<p>A lot of CS internships are for between soph/junior and junior/senior years since at the end of the freshman year they still don’t know all that much relatively. Many of the CS internships are more like jobs where the student is actually contributing to a project, i.e. not a burden and not just filing papers or something, and is providing a real value to the company. Most CS internships are paid internships with some paying pretty well. A lot of them end up turning into full time job offers upon graduation.</p>
<p>If he wants to do a study-abroad in the summer, which sometimes works better for CS students due to scheduling, then between freshman/soph year is a good time for it then he could do internships the other summers.</p>
<p>Good luck to him.</p>
<p>My son is a computer science major at Carnegie Mellon. The easiest place to make first contact seemed to be the technology job fair in the late fall. He missed that his freshman year and ended up getting a summer job through connections. Sophomore year he wise up. Went to the fair, had a some phone interviews, accepted an offer and then the market crashed and the offer was withdrawn. He ended up scrambling and found another internship through word of mouth surprisingly late in the spring. They flew him out and paid for his apartment. He was debugging drivers for NVidea I think that summer. Last summer same process - got several phone interviews, was flown out for some in person interviews and had offers to choose from. My son had a couple of summers and school year time of work experience before he even got to Carnegie Mellon which I am sure helped make him more hirable. He’d also spent a huge amount of time teaching himself Linux.</p>
<p>How much can an intern receive payment wise?</p>
<p>The NSF/REU type internships usually run around $10/hour. Private stuff I’d say starts around $15 and goes up from there but you often have to provide your own housing and transportation for the latter.</p>
<p>S1 made $14-15/hr at internships at academic institutions, $20/hr for designing an app for a small company, and considerably more at major employers. He makes enough to pay his own summer rent and expenses, plus put something aside for school. (We do not pay expenses for living away from home over the summer unless it were an exceptional opportunity that would be helpful for one’s future employment/grad school prospects, i.e., an overseas unpaid internship.)</p>
<p>He feels very fortunate to have marketable skills in this economy.</p>
<p>My son (sophomore) just got an IT internship for $3800/month. He accepted it immediately. </p>
<p>mdcissp, if you have contacts that could help your son get an internship in his desired field, use them. Immediately. Do not wait to see what shakes out during a job fair or professors. It’s getting late, he could end up with nothing. If you have friends/family who are in the business and can get him through the door, ask them! They may be thrilled to help. Nope, it’s not cheating, it’s not doing the work for him, but it is a tough job market out there and sometimes they are just names and numbers on a resume, no matter how bright and accomplished they are.</p>
<p>Get thee to the telephone and help your son!! That is how people are getting jobs out there now, in every field.</p>
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<p>Comparatively to other majors there are more summer internship available so might be easier to find.</p>
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<p>Generally yes, if the companies come to college career center for New College Graduate recruitment then they offer summer internship for freshman, sophomore and juniors too.</p>
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<p>Depend on the college, if there are ample companies visiting career office and the child is responsible then you don’t have to worry.</p>
<p>DD has more offers this year (Sophomore) than last year with much better pay. She even had offers from French companies for paid summer internship in Paris and other locations in France. </p>
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This year the best offer DD has of $6000/month for a period of 3 months while last year the best was $2000/month which she declined as it was in NYC.</p>
<p>All the interviews this year span 3 phases and the top two involved full day final interview at companies head quarter on their expense.
It was stressful for DD as after 3 weeks of constant interviewing and reaching final stages of 8 companies she had this feeling of the whole effort going waste. But she learned a lot during this process.</p>
<p>DS’s school seems to be very well connected. Both last year (soph) and this, he had offers from several very well known companies - he was interviewed on campus, over the phone, and was flown to a couple of places. All of these events were organized by the school - sometimes one company came and interviewed for full time and/or internships, and there was at least one job fair where there were numerous companies. DS had such a big critical mass of classmates in the West Coast that he actually drove a couple times to other cities to see his friends.</p>
<p>Can’t tell if this is true for most in the industry or if it’s just his school, but this aspect has exceeded all of our prior expectations. Since he finalized his offers some time ago, I’m not sure how late in the season these offers are still available. The only disappointment was my personal prejudice - the ones who paid the megabucks were in financial services, but even the technical oriented companies offered what I felt were extremely generous stipends, and relocation/housing assists.</p>
<p>I recently turned down an internship offer at a relatively well known company (in industry) that offered a compensation package of roughly $20k for 12 weeks; we had to handle our own housing, though. This seems to be standard for many of the “top” companies for a 12 week internship, at least from Brown.</p>