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<p>I don’t think it is possible to work worth that much and it’s generally a recruitment vehicle for future employees.
In DD’s case she was bent upon spending 3 months in Paris until this came along. They really did a good job brain washing.</p>
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<p>What’s with high end bike? DD seems to be getting one too and DW is at cross road again as she doesn’t want DD to be riding bike in Boston. DD being a student doesn’t want to give away freebees.</p>
<p>elle,
DS internships, 1 was a recruiting type, 1 was an extension of his job at school, and 1 was at a university, and two were research positions that did not have extensions to job other than being placed in the open candidate pool (tough in a hire freeze in 2008).</p>
<p>My son (very good at what he does and had worked in high school too) got $25/hour after his freshman year and more after that when he was at Nvidea and Google.)</p>
<p>He’s at CMU. There’s a job fair in the fall and another one in February, but also a huge word of mouth network. He got the Nvidea job at the last minute when the internship he had been going to do fell through due to the 2009 economy and CMU grad there told him there were openings. The career office has lots of listings too.</p>
<p>The California internships have all included reimbursement for housing and flying out. He’s been flown to a number of interviews as well. He’s graduating in May and had a job offer in the early fall from his summer internship. Can’t say enough good things about Carnegie Mellon!</p>
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The latter definitely happens (the top students get offers immediately after the summer for full time work). Microsoft hires students for positions where there are openings and they’d otherwise hire a full time employee, so the students do work like the more experienced members…I just don’t think they’ll have a huge impact in 12 weeks, when some of that time goes to training.</p>
<p>I stand corrected, if there are plenty of opportunities available out there for internships even at this late date. I had thought the top dogs filled their openings a long time ago. These kids are really fortunate to be in an industry with so many opportunities available, though CS sure isn’t for everyone. I wonder what other majors have such highly paid internships with multiple opportunities (have another kid going to college soon).</p>
<p>All that said, I know a couple of folks my age with years of serious CS experience who can’t get hired for love or money. The companies hiring seem to want young blood.</p>
<p>As for the $$$ – my S made more money than I did last year. Was pretty sobering to both of us.</p>
<p>busdriver, S has had multiple offers for this summer and is currently negotiating his ideal summer experience. Two of them were made in the past week.</p>
<p>I posted my question fall semester not knowing what to expect. Thank you all for sharing your great results and internship offers. I am very happy for you. My son quickly got a paid summer internship at the school internship fair for this summer. He said the recruiters were largely interested in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering students.</p>
<p>“I posted my question fall semester not knowing what to expect. Thank you all for sharing your great results and internship offers. I am very happy for you. My son quickly got a paid summer internship at the school internship fair for this summer.”</p>
<p>Oh that’s so funny, I thought you had just started this thread, I didn’t look at the date! I thought he was just starting to look in April. That is wonderful that your son got a job so quickly…we should be asking you questions, instead of giving advice.</p>
<p>Congratulations to your son, also, CountingDown, he must be thrilled to be in such a great position to make a choice. These kids are so fortunate that they chose an industry with so much opportunity.</p>
<p>^Not CountingDown, but speaking for my son - he was lucky. But I’m not sure choose is the right verb. He was bitten by the bug at age seven. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. My younger son briefly tried to get interested and found it boring.</p>
<p>It does seem with this field you have a passion for it…or absolutely none. Not alot inbetween. I tried to take a class in it 30 years ago (it was actually going to be my major) and was so bored I dropped it instantly!</p>
<p>When I read about these spectacular internship offers coming through for CMU kids. Although I am very happy with my son’s current school, I wonder if I made a mistake not to encourage him to apply ED to SCS at CMU. CMU posters-were you accepted ED at CMU?</p>
<p>No. But DS would have been the ideal ED candidate because that’s where he wanted to go, and we were prepared for full pay. However, we never found out clearly in time if you could apply ED to SCS and if rejected, still be RD for ECE and Info systems, but not be forced to accept ED in the latter two colleges. </p>
<p>OP, I wouldn’t look back at your decision one bit; just yesterday I was talking to someone who was commenting on how things were at a large company he worked for. He said there were a significant number of Penn State employees and several CMU grads too, and in mid-career, when the company fell upon hard times and subsequently recovered, his observation in his limited world was that the Penn Staters on an average fared better in the real-world environment. CMU may have an edge coming out of the gate, but later on in the career, your kid may very well be employing a lot of them - it depends more on how he reads the industry and the people than technical skills at that phase of the career.</p>
<p>Also admit I made the same mistake as BD when I first posted on this thread and assumed you had started this thread just now and not last fall.</p>
<p>My son was accepted, RD, to CMU-SCS but chose to go to another school with a lesser ranked engineering/CS program (Vanderbilt, so university is high rank overall, but not so much in his field). Money was part of it (full tuition + merit award), but there were numerous other factors. In truth, the other school still standing at the end of April was not CMU, it was U Chicago.</p>
<p>I worried just a bit about his choice, but the worries were for naught, for him, as far as I can see. He did a lot of research, has an unusually good publishing record for an undergraduate, had an internship that paid well, doing work he loves with a lot of independence. His job offer was in hand by last August, and the company paid him to do part time research during the school year at $30/hr.</p>
<p>Of course, one cannot say how things would have gone at a different school, and he is an extreme go-getter, so I can’t say that his experience is the same as someone else who chooses a less renowned program. However, as I stated in an earlier post, there were interns from a wide variety of programs last summer. (Not Google, not a big name company. A relatively young software services company that is small enough that I am not going to name it. That was his choice, because he feels he has a lot of independence and recognition.)</p>
<p>I’m not saying CMU SCS is not worth the money–far from it. However, I don’t think one’s fate is sealed by attending another good program, if the student is intent upon maxing out the opportunities and taking a lot of initiative. There is a floor, though; I think there has to be a certain level of funded research going on, and the door has to be open to undergraduates, early.</p>
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What I’ve seen also.</p>
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Agree 100% - your “fate” could indeed be better in several other programs based on what DS has observed in the mix of students he and his classmates have encountered.</p>
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<p>It’s never about the self motivated top students but the average student that a top schools make a difference at all levels.</p>
<p>A self motivate student can be home schooled and achieved the maximum success.
A good structured program at top school help everyone at the school to achieve the success.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for your support. The internship results from CMU are eye popping. Nevertheless, we are very happy with my son’s current school where he has merit scholarships. You are all right not to look back. A lot of these schools is what a student makes of the opportunities available. My concern with CMU is that it has a narrow focus on tech–great education, but wanted a more balanced education with opportunities to explore beyond tech.</p>
<p>“My concern with CMU is that it has a narrow focus on tech–great education, but wanted a more balanced education with opportunities to explore beyond tech.”</p>
<p>That may not be an actual issue with CMU, there are several fine schools and programs that that are not tech heavy. Even the CS majors also have to minor in something else, and they do have some non-tech core requirements. Now someone could mostly limit themselves to tech related courses with a CS degree, but that would be by their own choosing.</p>
<p>You never know how things are going to work out. If your son has a great school with merit aid, opportunities, and is happy…there is no looking back on that one. I wonder what the percentage of people that start out as CS or ECE majors at CMU actually end up graduating with that major, as I’m sure a number of people realize the workload is going to kill them, and change majors or schools. So much has to do with the friends and contacts you make, both socially or scholastically.</p>
<p>My son didn’t apply ED because he thought he wanted to go to MIT. I think he was happier at CMU. You can get a balanced education at CMU, and they have Gen Ed requirements that are perfectly reasonable on paper, but my kid got out of most of them with AP credits. I like to say my son chose to get a British style education at SCS, but you don’t have to. (His minor was physics.) There is not a big drop out rate from SCS, as best I can recall, though there are always a handful. CMU has a school of arts and sciences as well as drama, art, music and architecture. I’d say it’s dominated by people who already know what they want to do when they grow up though and that leads to perhaps a somewhat more driven population than other schools.</p>
<p>“There is not a big drop out rate from SCS, as best I can recall, though there are always a handful”</p>
<p>I don’t think many people drop out of school, but might just change their majors. Certainly the students that are in SCS in the first place generally have a very strong interest and ability in CS, and are high achievers. I read a paper awhile ago, where they did a study on this. I don’t remember how dated it was, but it said about 1/3 of the women in their study ended up changing their major from CS, about double the rate of men.</p>
<p>^I realize I wasn’t clear. If you change majors you drop out of SCS, but not out of Carnegie Mellon. I think part of the issue with the drop out rate for women is that fewer of them have extensive previous experience with CS. My son took AP Comp Sci as a freshman in high school and even then it was too easy. Although SCS has different levels of intro courses, I am sure it’s much harder for those without experience to catch up and some of them are bound to realize that it’s not their thing. They accept a bunch of students they think have the potential to be good in CS, but who really don’t know if they’ll like it yet. They are up against students like my son had been breathing computer programming since he was 7 or 8 years old. There are support groups for the women. I don’t know how active or effective they are.</p>