Computer Science & Software Engineering Internship
Overview
It is hoped that the following information will help you understand what you need to do to fulfill the Internship Requirement for your degree.
As part of the CS/CSE degrees, you are required to do an internship. We hope that you will be able to::
- Gain real-world experience to make you more marketable
- Academic environments are not the same as being an employee. For one, the school provides a small, condensed learning environment. If you were to put a class in the work environment, it would be 3 weeks (3 credit class, 2 hours out of class/credit = 9 hours, over 15 weeks ~- 3 weeks). Remember condensed.
- Build up your resume
- Too many times a student has walked in and told me that they can not find a full-time job. Looking at their resume and they have no job experience. Through the internship program, we are trying to prevent the chicken and egg problem, where you need a job to get experience, but can't get a job because you don't have experience.
- Explore possible career paths, in a low stakes enviroment
- This is your time to think about what you want to do as a career, what companies you want to work for, and how you are going to get there. "I don't know what I want to do. Computers are fun, and I want to try everything." That is alright, some of us still not sure, but a word of warning, take a word from the Chesire Cat.
- “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Before your Junior Year
You need to prepare for your internship. You need to build your resume. Making a resume is not building your resume. Your resume is your avatar in the realm of job hunting. It is a living document, meaning it will constantly be changing.
Determine what you want to do
Field of Profession: There are many different areas with software that you can find work. Here are some ideas:
- Front-End Applications: Project can be developed on any platform: PC, Mac, Web, Mobile, GUI, etc.
- Language: You can research or create a new language or analysis old.
- Requirements/Design: This should be a customer-driven project.
- Back-End applications: Highly robust applications require back-end work including Servers, hardware, architecture, distributed systems.
- Database: Uses of databases from flat files to DB management system, and DB modeling & structuring.
- Security: Information, Technology, and Programming security
- AI, Machine Learning, Data Mining: Data manipulation and presentation
- Configuration/Document Management: Control of software & project deliveries, evidence, and data.
- Testing: Plan, data, scope, and types of testing from unit to regression to factory and delivery.
- Quality Assurance: Providing a valid, certified, expected product to a customer
- Project Management: Organizing people, resources, time, and budget.
- Software Maintenance: Do no harm, archeologist
- Research & Development: New ways of doing stuff, ideas, collaboration
Another great opportunity is to attend Job Fairs, Department Forums, Society Guest Speakers, and Company Information Sessions. You should attend this as a reconnaissance, gather as much information as you can to learn about opportunities in the field. See Finding a Job below for more information on these activities.
Create a resume, COVER Letter and References
You need to stop by the Career Service Center, attend Career Workshops on making a resume.
- Contact information – Name, Email, Phone Number (minimum)
- Education – Your degree and when you plan on graduating, class projects, etc
- Skills – Programming Languages, Concepts, Principles
- Experience
- You should try to get at least two jobs listed in this section. If you haven’t got a part-time job, get one. The best is to have had one on campus and another one off of campus (during off semester, etc).
- You can include your Mission in this section if applicable.
- Personal Projects
- Having talked to several companies, they all say they like personal projects as they distinguish you from the rest of the students in your class.
- Working with societies and outside of class projects, competitions, etc.
Make a Generic Cover Letter. Never use this Generic Cover Letter. What? That is right. A cover letter is a bridge between the job description and your resume. It introduces you to your resume avatar. For each job application that you apply for, you will make a new cover letter or a version of your Generic Cover Letter. You will identify what skills match the job description and why. You will also identify what skills you lack and how you are going to overcome them. You will also show some of your personality, hobbies, and interests.
Start a Reference page now. Reference should include teachers, coaches, leaders. Try to avoid bishops, and church leaders, some information you don't want to be shared, shouldn't and can not be shared with these individuals. Ask your References 1st if they mind being references. Ask for a letter of reference, always a good artifact to handout at an interview.
Build your resume
This is the harder part. You need to have experiences to showcase on your resume. These experiences as mentioned above, are jobs and personal experie
Job experience
A really good resume should have at least 3 jobs by the time you graduate: Unrelated career job, a realted job, and an Internship.
- Unrelated career job: These are jobs you get during the summer or on campus that help pay the bills. The job is to show case that you can work under direction and are a team player (soft skill). This is to prepare you to get a Related career job. This will be one of the first job you dump from your resume after you get your 1st job.
- Related career job: The purpose of this job is that you are gaining experience for your internship. These jobs can be Teacher or Lab Assistance, working IT, local computer companies and jobs that are remote or part-time.
- Internship: This job will get you in the door, many time companies will vet and hire their interns. You can have as many Internship jobs as you would like. The graduation requirement is that you take CSE 398 while you are doing an Internship job.
Some suggestions on looking for these jobs:
Personal Experience
In addition to experience, a good resume will have personal projects. Personal projects are not class projects. Class projects are those projects done during class, they will not separate you from the crowd of other students from the school and these projects should be a list with the Education section of your resume.
Personal Projects include a project that you do in your spare time. It shows initiative (soft skill). Here are a couple of suggestions.
- School Societies
- The school has several student run professional societies that meet once a week and work on different projects.
- Association of Computer Machinery (ACM),
- Artificial Intelligence,
- Data Science,
- Soc. Of Woman in Engineering, and
- IEEE
- Research and Business Development Center
- Research and Creative Works Conference
- Attend hackathons or participate in a compitition.
- ELEVATE: An Interdisciplinary Competition for Social Change - great opportunty to solve real world problems.
Junior Year
Your Junior year is when you should start your job search. The plan is to obtain an internship during your Off Semester between your Junior and Senior year. Yes, you will be qualified to do an Internship by the end of your Junior Year. Most companies understand the skill set at this level and accept the risks, required On The Job (OTJ) training that needs to happen when hiring Interns.
Looking for a Job
What type of Internship should you be looking for:
- The Internship must be related to your degree. (See ideas above), and at least has a programming aspect.
- Ideally the Internship should be full-time. 400-500 during a 12-15 week period. If your internship is part time, you need 30+ weeks, to reach the 400-500 hour goal.
- It should be paid. You are a professional with professional high-demain skills. If you get a Internship that is unpaid you can apply a school's scholarship, and the number of hours drop to 300-400 over a 12-15 period.
- The Internship can be at the office or remote.
There are two main approaches to finding a job: Networking, Direct approach, and Job Search Engines.
Networking is one of the most rewarding and effective ways of finding a job. The amount of effort to reward (Return on Investment - ROI) is small. Most students will get an Internship after talking to 10 or so networking points of contact. Here are some starting points:
- Family or Friends that know someone in the field
- Internship Missionaries
- LinkedIn - networking with people you know, try #tags, such as #csinternship
- Alumni - attend BYU, BYU-Idaho alumni activities
Working through a network, your resume by-passes the Job Search Engines AI, it by-passes the poor intern that is sorting resumes and gets your resume on the project manager's desk.
The Direct Approach is to talk to a representative of the company. The venue for this is Job Fairs, Department Forums, Society Guest Speakers, and Company Information Sessions. Typically an individual from the company has authority to hire and you are only competing with your classmates and not the entire world of college students.
- Job Fairs
- Both BYU-Idaho and BYU hold annual job fairs. BYU Provo holds a STEM Fair in September, and BYU-Idaho holds two one in October and the other in February.
- Department Forums
- We have guest speakers from various companies that speak on career advice and topics from their company's product line (domain knowledge) and usually pass out contact information for questions and job opportunities.
- Society Guest Speakers
- Many of the societies have professional guest speakers come in and talk about their company. They will sponsor the project and the Department's Research and Creative Works Conference.
- Company Information Sessions
- Companies will come and spend time on our campus recruiting students. This is a great opportunity. They are looking for you.
Also, apply to companies that have already worked with BYU-Idaho students either by coming to the job fair or hiring interns. Here is the link to our current database.
Job Search Engines is a little less than effective but has results. For your information, you will have to provide 100 jobs that you applied for before we start talking about alternates for Internships. Records have shown that most students will get an Internship around the 25th or 75th job application, plus or minus 10 applications. So start your record now, with date, company website, job title & description. Here are some search engines:
- Handshake
- Indeed.com
- Dice.com
- Stackoverflow.com/jobs
Another reason a search engine is ineffective, your resume has to get passed both the AI engine and HR. Both have no idea what your potential is.
Interview
The next step is the Interview. That is your goal is to get the Interview. Get as many interviews as possible, practice interviewing, it is well worth your time. Do some research on the company, because the first question they will ask is, "What do you know about our company?", it is their pride. You need to know their lexicon, every company uses a set of words to communicate about common ideas. What is their product line? Who are their customers, suppliers, and users? What can you do to help them?
Found a job, need to apply for admitance to CSE 398/498R class
Wow. Congratulations. You have a job offer. Accept it, write a letter back of gratitude and make sure that they know you have accepted the job. Please read everything in this section, before sending the letter back.
Your next step is to fill out the iPlan: Internship: Request form. You will need your job's contact information, usually the information contained in the offer works and the job description.
Common question: How many credits? The class is variable credit and is up to you. For the degree, it is set a 1 credit to keep the degree under 120 credits. You can set it to 3 and the other 2 credits come from your general electives. Some students decide on this and take another 3 credit class, to qualify for financial aid.
After you fill out the form several things happen:
- An email is sent to your hiring manager or project manager, whichever person you entered in the Form. That person needs to electronically sign the University Master Agreement. Please include this information in your Acceptance Letter, if the company doesn't already have a standing agreement.
- An email is sent to the CSE Internship coordinator. It is looked over for Correct year, semester, course number, and the number of credits, Job Description matches degree, Total Weekly hours are 20-40 and anticipated total hours are 300-400. What has not checked: Course prerequisites (you need to have taken CS 308 or CSE 310 first).
- After that, if you are an International Student a link to the form is to the International Office, where they verify CPT information and dates.
- After that, it goes to Career Services who does a final look over and opens the semester's course for you to register for the course.
Internship Class
The Internship Class will consist of 1 credit worth of effort. Each week you will participate in a discussion topic via iLearn course. Each topic is meant for you to find out information about your company and share it with your classmates. This will help facilitate the collaboration of ideas relating to jobs. Helping develop good questions to ask in the interview process, career development paths, and general vision of where you want to go as a professional.
The university requires that you complete a report on the Internship. The report must be completed or you are not considered eligible to pass the course and get a grade for the assignments.
You must pass the class, by completing the assignments to receive credit for the class.
Alternate Plan for Internship
There are a few alternative plans for Internships.
- If you can't find an Internship after you have worked with Career Services, applied to over 100 document jobs, and 20 non-paid jobs, come to us, and we work on you taking an alternate project's class that is equivalent to an Internship..
Contact for Further Questions
To find current Computer Science & Software Engineer Internship Coordinators
For Internship Requirements, Select Computer Science and Software Enginnering.
Additional Links