I had 6 internships under my belt by college graduation and they taught me a lot. However, by and large, I learned more about workplaces and teamwork than about

I had 6 internships under my belt by college graduation and they taught me a lot. However, by and large, I learned more about workplaces and teamwork than about difficult programming situations. Internships, in most of my experience, don't encourage really hard programming work. I got that with my CS degree. The theory classes were 7 out of the 15 classes I took, but the programming classes were just as intense. We did complex image recognition in groups in Java the first year, tons of Scheme and Oz to learn concepts, and then wrote a whole networking stack and basic Linux OS in C. The latter two projects were significantly harder than anything I've done at an internship and required teamwork and a great deal of self-teaching. It may be that my experience was abnormal (the school had a small but recognized CS dept), but I got the meat of my practical programming skills at school (ignoring independent work for the sake of focused discussion). Internships were certainly useful - but in my reflections I don't think they increased my programming power, if you will, all that much compared to school.