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I actually thought the same thing about the internship cycle last year. At the school I went to, almost every engineer I knew had accepted an internship by Dec
by wikyd 16y ago
I actually thought the same thing about the internship cycle last year. At the school I went to, almost every engineer I knew had accepted an internship by December and many had by October. I was actually really surprised to see that many great students from schools that don't have a heavy GOOG/MSFT/AMZN, etc. recruiting presence were looking for internships up through the end of April. Also, we saw a lot of sophomores applying around this time as well.
Startups tend to be less picky about year of graduation and more interested in the capabilities of the student. The best intern I've had was a sophomore who within a month was contributing like a regular member of the team. We had him stay on part-time through the next school year.
I'm pretty confident we'll find good students again this year even in April. If this experiment goes well, we'll probably try another push in the fall to help startups edge in on big company recruiting territory.
- sunilgarg 16y agoI agree, there are plenty of great intern candidates out there even in mid-April, but the cycle is definitely winding down. I'd suspect that the students interviewing now are, on average, not as competitive as the ones who received offers weeks or months ago. I'd hesitate to stereotype startups' hiring preferences, but encourage students to apply to any company that's remotely interesting. Just like the bigger corporations, there's a huge variance: I've approached some startups about internships only to realize that their singular focus was to bring on full-time engineers ASAP, and worked for others that hired and mentored younger students with great success. It's often impossible to tell without starting a conversation.