Hi, I’m currently a junior and am planning to major in comp sci. I have experience in app development and have done a few personal projects, and I’ve recently fostered an interest in machine and deep learning and plan to build upon that as my so-called “spike” in my college app.
However, just yesterday I had a chance to speak with a CEO of a small startup company, and I might get an offer for a paid internship in the company as a web developer. My question is: would this internship help? I’m probably going to take it as it’s a great opportunity that I’ll probably never get again, but I’m concerned that web development might be a bit too far off from what I’ve been doing so far, and is probably closer to web design.
It does depend a lot if the job is more design as opposed to development. With development, you’re getting more into pure coding and perhaps database work. With design, probably more pure HTML/CSS. However, interacting with the developers is still valuable experience.
I think either way though, as long as you are doing meaningful work, any kind of experience helps with your resume. As long as it doesn’t interfere with your school work.
Web development is a great way to build out your professional toolkit . You will get the opportunity to use IDEs, git, and debuggers. You will probably be working with databases, asynchronous APIs, and security policies. Code optimization and test building is a given.
If you can, negotiate the internship title of something like “software developer intern” rather than “web developer”. (Titles are cheap…most startup employers are happy to oblige on that)
Also, I’ve yet to work at any startup where developers didn’t get their hands on multiple different projects. Expect to wear several hats and welcome the chaos (there will be chaos). The CEO needs you to do web development but if you demonstrate competence early, you will be in a great position to seek out other challenges.
Yes, a paid internship as a high school junior is a rare opportunity, so take it. At the very least, you can get to see what working in that kind of environment is like. But it also counts as work experience (and potentially career-relevant if you continue to go into that area, or computing in general).
If the only thing you learned was CSS it would still be excellent experience. The more skills you have to help out on front-end, back-end, or middle tier, the better.
