Summer Internships

Question

Everyone knows about Fog Creek Software's Internships. I was wondering if there are any other regular software / development internships that anyone would recommend?

In addition, would I have a chance? Fog Creek's requirements are very vague. Is anyone more familiar with their "real life" requirements are? I am currently confident in compliant (X/D)HTML and have written a PHP backend (with twitter/rss integration) for a game reporting system (offline generally, will be reused once a year for game), have two (small, but annoyingly clean, lampp) published websites, have had one job working on SEO for a medium sized corporate website (hopefully will have a rec) (iis), one windows form written in c# (installable UI for seo program i wrote) which by that point I like to think i will have rewritten in c/c++ to try to learn that. My HS grades are awful though from a top school, and have never taken a programming class (this is about to change [freshman yr starts]).

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

First of all, there's the Google Summer of Code program, which is more or less like an internship. There's probably a lot of companies in your neighbourhood that have programs like this, I know there's some in mine. Just look around on their websites if they have an internship or program you're interested in.

Answer 2

I believe Fog Creek's internships (and most software engineering internships) are aimed for after your sophomore or junior year of college -- that's not to say you're unqualified, but that you're probably missing some foundational knowledge that you'd need to successfully pick up some topics you'd be working with.

That said, you already have a head start with some hands-on experience, but it's important to separate web technologies from more "traditional" programming as well. Your grades being "awful" may or may not be a problem, but your high school grades also won't matter once you start college; this is your chance for a fresh start, so do well in college and make sure you broaden your experiences with side projects/open-source work/etc. Definitely look into programming internships or co-ops after your first or second year, and strengthen your programming skills on your own as well.

Joel has written at length about the amount of "bad code" everyone needs to write to "get it out of their system", so definitely work on getting experience -- I don't believe it needs to be with Fog Creek, just do what you can to improve and make yourself an attractive applicant for future jobs.