This may be a bit of quiet topic now but I still thought I'd throw in my comments. I interned at a start up in my penultimate year and it was both a great expe

This may be a bit of quiet topic now but I still thought I'd throw in my comments. I interned at a start up in my penultimate year and it was both a great experience, and I got paid (not a lot, but enough). I got to learn about business practices quickly, I did some meaningful work and contributed towards several products, we practised agile methods and it was all round a good experience. There was, however, more legacy code here than I've had to deal with before. In my final year I started applying to more start ups (in London this time), and got offers from a number of them, I didn't take any of them. Why? They all wanted me to work for free. Working for free in central London? I don't need the experience of an unknown company that bad (harsh CV reality). So I instead did the usual and got a (well paying) internship at a big bank. I had a great time, didn't run into very much legacy code, worked with lots of very cool, and very new, technologies, and learnt a lot about technology and business. It didn't take much consideration when deciding to take their job offer afterwards, turning down my MSc offers. The kind of work I was going to be doing from day one mattered a lot to me, and it didn't seem to be much of a comparison. There just really wasn't much to entice me into a startup again.