There’s a perception that internships offer little more than a crash course in coffee-making and coffee delivery. Some, however, go quite a bit further.
It’s easy to imagine that tech internships wouldn’t involve a whole lot of hands-on work with real-life projects – a tiny code error can have a disproportionately large knock-on effect on a product. As a result, many programmes fall back on hackathons, giving interns a taste of coding through projects that are safely separate from the company’s public offering.
AOL takes a different tack.
Every year, the tech giant offers two nine-month programmes in Dublin. While the initial month of the internship is spent on a single test project, hackathon-style, the intern is then assigned to an active engineering team for the remaining eight months.
Interns are fully integrated into the AOL team; participating in daily scrum meetings, writing live production code and even enjoying the benefits of the company’s Sports and Social club.
Designed to develop technical and communication skills, the programmes introduce interns to the fun, but challenging, environment of real-life tech work.
Conor Thompson, who has just completed an internship at AOL, found that the programme helped him to grow in his career. In fact, he said, he could see himself changing.
AOL’s internship programme is currently open to applicants. Applications can be submitted via aolcareers.com.
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