Good luck, keep looking all the way up to summer. That internship my son had last summer was only for July and August. Sometimes people need help but they don’t know it until summer arrives, especially the smaller places. The big companies are just rerunning the same ads they run every year. Those are harder to get.
True - smaller companies don’t know their finacial constraintst as early . At DS’s engineering college, parents of older kids mention internship offers that had come in April and even May.
Another suggestion is to keep an eye out for ads needing temp work that have some type of engineering related work. Everyone is looking for that magic word “internship” in ads but working at in any capacity for a company that does construction or manufacturing and being a “assistant” or even a driver delivering engineering/computer products and interacting with customers is fine experience.
My son had no luck finding an internship. He ended up talking to one of his professors about some research he was doing. My son was his unpaid experimenter and programmer for the summer. He was living in an off campus house, so we were paying rent on it over the summer whether he was there or not; and we were having to pay for his food anyways. So, it wasn’t a burden in any way for him to do it. There were 2 other students also working for this one professor and they did some collaboration but mostly worked independently.
When he went to look for a job, the programming that he did (his specialty was robotics) was just what one company was looking for. He showed them a copy of what he did and the interview went great. He got the job.
So, not having an internship isn’t the end of the world. Keep looking but it would be good to have backup plan.
HPuck, I have suggested to Lake Jr. that he get all the programming experience that he can; so many times that I am blue in the face. Technology employers highly value engineering kids with good programming skills.