Posts Tagged ‘internships’

A recent contribution I made on LinkedIn:

The act of looking for an internship is a great first step – good for you! There are many resources. First, check with your professors – they may know of open internships. Next, your school’s Careers or Counseling office. They know the sites most often leading to successful internship connections. Third, check known internship sites, like Handshake at https://joinhandshake.com/. Fourth, check out Meetups / Meetup.com. It’s often who you know, not just the little what at this stage in your career. Meetups help you create relationships in your industry of choice. Best of all, they’re free, and there’s often pizza, so you can have informal, less stressful, conversations. Good luck!

I recently enjoyed a “fireside chat” at the Indy .NET Consortium, a meetup I run for local .NET developers.

I’ve had some good conversations with interns and others recently who have struggled with or had insights into this transition. My experience as a young developer was a bit different, because I didn’t take the traditional path of high school -> college -> workforce. Mine was high school -> college -> co-op -> left-school to work and create career -> go back to school -> leave school to work again -> work for startup -> work for consulting firm -> start a business -> shut down business and go back to workforce.

Our October 5 meetup talked about how the traditional path can be a bit jarring. The way I explained it to my employees was “In school, you can get an A, B, C, D, or F. And that’s OK. You learn from it. But in the workforce, you either get an A or an F. You can have as many Fs as you want, as long as you end up with an A. Sometimes, within reason, I’ll accept an A- or B+, but it’s rare. We’re paid to deliver, not pass lessons.”

You can watch the entire discussion below: