An engineering summer internship is a great way to gain some experience and insight into the “real world”, and help you on your way to becoming a licensed professional engineer.   A summer internship program provides a work experience in a corporate environment to outstanding college students ranging from sophomores through PhD levels.  Some companies offer internships not only in the summer, but also throughout the year.  Internships usually are about 10 weeks long.  In any case, an internship usually is better in the long run than an ordinary temporary summer job since the focus is on building for the future.

A company offering an internship program should do so with three goals in mind:

1. Provide summer employment with positive work and training experience
2. Identify and track potential regular full-time employees
3. Establish “goodwill ambassadors” for the company on campuses

Those seeking an internship should be aware of the criteria needed to obtain such a position.  Citizenship, grade point average, and travel & living issues may all be involved.  It is important to start your search early for an intern position.  They are often very limited, and the competition is great.  Offers for summer internships can be made as early as November of the preceding year, and are often completed by March. 

So how do you find these internships?  There are a number of ways, the most common are:

• Company web sites (the internships are sometimes listed along with regular positions available or there are specific intern web pages available)
• On campus recruitment events
• Honor societies and technical organizations
• Friends, relatives, and other acquaintances (check with your professors, they often have industry contacts)

An engineering summer intern should expect to be given a project that is well-defined, meaningful with specific objectives set.  It is expected that the project would be outlined to the intern with specific milestones set.  Any needed training would also be provided.  This is another benefit of internship; often an entire corporate curriculum of short courses is available to the intern.  Of course, since the intern would need to be focused on completing an assignment in about 10 weeks, care is needed not to spend too much time on extraneous training. 

See also Summer Internship - Employer’s Perspective

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Employment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.