The Perfect Internship

Photo Credit: Stuart Isett for The New York Times

It’s officially spring, and many students are currently searching for summer internships. Here in Silicon Valley, the market for computer science (CS) internships is highly competitive. Many students struggle to land internship offers. But suppose, hypothetically, that a student received multiple offers. What factors would influence her decision on which offer to accept?

Now, I am not a CS major. But as an MS Statistics student hoping to work in the field of analytics and data science, I value some of the same things that a CS major values in an internship. For me, there are three things that are most important to me. One is the possibility of the internship leading to a full-time position after I graduate. In Silicon Valley, connections are still the best way to land a job. If the company is open to hiring me after I graduate based on the great work I did as an intern, I cannot afford to pass up that opportunity. This sentiment is shared by other students, as shown in a study James Risley wrote about. Out of all the factors that students value in an internship, career advancement opportunity was the most important attribute (Risley, 2015).

Another thing that is important to me is learning skills not currently being taught in my grad program, namely tools for working with large terabyte-scale data such as MapReduce, Hadoop, and Spark. It seems that few students are exposed to these in their university programs; the bulk of people become familiar with these tools on the job. Thus, I need to learn those tools in order to stay competitive when I graduate and begin hunting for a job in data science.

My ability to learn, however, depends on whether I am in an environment that is conducive to learning. This leads me to the third thing that’s important to me, and I believe it is THE most important one: a good mentor. Even if I am surrounded by the fanciest technology in the world, I can’t learn unless I have someone who is willing to teach me, and is invested in my success. I do not thrive in very unstructured environments wherein I am expected to be practically independent. I need someone who is patient enough to explain concepts, and is interested in building a solid working relationship with me. I need to get the sense that I have something valuable to contribute. This is especially important to me as a minority woman planning to make a career in tech, where men greatly outnumber women; if I don’t feel like I belong, I am not going to come back. The importance of mentors is reiterated by Gloria Townsend in a 2002 paper. She wrote, “Whether mentors are men or women, if mentors can provide encouragement in a genuine and sincere manner, then these simple actions can transform the way a young woman views her connectedness to our discipline.” (Townsend, 2002)


Works Cited
Isett, S. (Photographer). (2007). [Untitled photograph of female students in front of a computer], Retrieved on April 1, 2016 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17comp.html?_r=0

Risley, J. (2015). Women nearly one third as likely to seek internships in tech, study finds. Geekwire. http://www.geekwire.com/2015/women-nearly-three-times-less-likely-to-seek-internships-in-tech-study-finds/

Townsend, G. C. (2002). People Who Make a Difference: Mentors and Role Models. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin - Women and Computing Homepage archive, 34(2), 57-61.