<p>Hi you all. I am a CS major at the University of Texas at Austin. I just went to the career fair of our college a while back and I asked many of the employers the question about internship. All of them just gave me a really general answer: We prefer applicants with internship.</p>
<p>I am graduating in May 2014. Current GPA 3.8, CS GPA 4.0. Have two certificates from Oracle (Java professional and SQL expert), will have another three from UT Austin upon graduation (INFOSEC, Game Development, and Business Foundation). I think I have decent background. But I am a transfer student and never got a chance to get an internship (I was from a small community college). And this summer I have to take courses, so no internship this summer.</p>
<p>I am just wondering, how many of you CS major folks have got a job straight out of college without having internship before? What's your strategy? Thank you so much.</p>
<p>There are a few things at play here. First of all, UT-Austin is a stellar CS school, and you do have a fantastic GPA. So you’d definitely get some interviews.</p>
<p>But an internship teaches you a lot that you’d never learn in school. Working at a company is a lot different than doing school projects. Moreover, it’s a good way for you to see what a company is like without any long-term commitment.</p>
<p>I can’t really give you much information on how prospects are like for someone with no past internships, because everyone I know has done or will be doing an internship (often more than one).</p>
<p>What I can say is that you’d be a fantastic applicant with an internship, and a great applicant without one. Are you sure you can’t do an internship during the summer or school year?</p>
<p>Having an internship is more important than GPA by a reasonable amount. I have a 3.87 GPA and I got 2 replies after attending my career fair (one was an unknown startup-ish company). This is when I had no internship experience previously. I eventually just had my resume passed to a top company by an acquaintance of mine and I got an interview.</p>
<p>Thanks guys certainly appreciate your inputs! And thanks sumzup for your encouragement btw. I am pretty sure I won’t be able to get an internship before I graduate. I started an open source game engine development project with one of my friends at the beginning of this semester but he just got a job offer and left with his unfinished codes, so it’s a mess now that I need to take care of. I am planning to work on it instead of internship since I started it already, so I will be building the basic framework of the engine this semester and summer, and hopefully will be able to finish writing the documentation and recruit some more dedicated developers in the fall as well. Hopefully this will make up my lack of internship. If not, I think I might still stick with it.</p>
<p>Good to have, but by no means necessary - especially if you’re graduating right now, went to a decent school, have a decent GPA, and are willing to relocate, if required.</p>
<p>When I hire CS majors, I certainly prefer that they have internship experience. In the absence of an internship, I would suggest participating in an open source project. Sounds like you are planning to do that. </p>
<p>However, personally, I would much rather see a job candidate participate in an existing, well-established open source project than start a new one. There is no barrier to entry to creating a new open source project. If you are a lousy software developer, you can start the project using lousy methods and not learn much of anything. Much better to work on an established open source project led by good developers, where you have the chance to learn from them. That is the whole point of an internship - to learn good habits from experienced developers.</p>
<p>IMO, you should find an internship this summer and just spend an extra semester before graduating. Even if you don’t, I’m sure you’re not going to have trouble with a 4.0 in CS. But do what you can to get on some sort of project, like research or an internship or something.</p>
<p>How about this? At least try applying to places and interviewing for internships, since this will give you good experience for when you interview for fulltime (interviewing is a skill that must be cultivated; it’s not enough to be a good programmer/CS student). If you do happen to get some offers, come back here and we’ll have a discussion.</p>
<p>My sister graduated from University of Michigan with a C.S degree and she did not do any internships. She landed a job in her senior year during a recruiting fair at the college. She is now working for a company in NY that deals with programming/software development for the army tech. I remember her telling me the lines for apple and google were hella long and that the lines for other tech companies were super short. (Everyone was aiming for the big rep companies) so she just applied to as many as the other tech companies there to increase her chances of being hired. </p>
<p>It’s been about 3 yrs I think, From what I remember when she first got the job I believe her starting salary was 55,000 or 65,000. I don’t know what her salary is now but from a recent conversation she told me that her job is getting a bit boring and that she is thinking about changing jobs and going into App development.</p>
<p>I am also attending college to major in C.S and honestly I don’t think C.S majors have anything to worry about.</p>
<p>hzesen1221 "I am pretty sure I won’t be able to get an internship before I graduate. "</p>
<p>It’s clear that you can get an internship but you are choosing not to so that you can spend time instead on your open source game engine development. I’m not sure that this is a wise decision but I’ll defer to those with specific experience in the industry.</p>
<p>hz, you have very desirable skills and should have no problem landing a good job. Some employers will have you solve problems online as part of the application process. Meanwhile, don’t overlook cultivating a positive reference letter from a favorite professor.</p>
<p>“Internship” does not need to be full time. A part time coding job during the school year (say, 16 hours a week) if you can find one would also help. I hire in the IT industry, and it would REALLY, REALLY, REALLY help your application to have some work experience in the field.</p>
<p>An internship will also be helpful if you can be exposed to technologies that your typical ABET school stays away from (heavy duty Oracle, various Business Intelligence tools, ETL, and the like). Forget about learning such technologies in a matter of weeks or months, but exposure is good…</p>