Internships help students connect what they have learned in the classroom to the real world, and students with access to internships are more likely to graduate and secure employment. However, many students are unable to find an internship by the time they graduate. This experience report describes a program where volunteer software engineers mentor students as they work on open-source projects in the summer, offered as an alternative to a traditional internship experience. We catalog the considerations involved in providing an experience similar to a traditional internship, describe our program's design, and provide two years' worth of participant evaluations and career outcomes as a measure of efficacy. The program served mostly undergraduates from non-R1 schools who are underrepresented in technology, and achieved similar educational outcomes to a traditional internship program. Most promisingly, mentors were willing to serve as a professional reference for 80% of students and the number of graduating seniors who secured full-time employment in technology was 7 points higher than average (despite occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic).
翻译:实习员帮助学生将他们在课堂上学到的东西与现实世界联系起来,有实习机会的学生更有可能毕业和获得就业。然而,许多学生在毕业时无法找到实习。本经验报告描述了一个方案,其中自愿软件工程师导师指导学生在夏季从事开放源码项目,作为传统实习经验的替代。我们把提供类似传统实习经验的考虑因素编成目录,描述我们方案的设计,并提供两年的参与者评价和职业成果作为衡量效果的尺度。该方案主要服务于技术领域代表性不足的非R1学校的本科生,并取得了与传统实习方案类似的教育成果。最有希望的是,导师愿意为80%的学生提供专业参考资料,获得全日制技术就业的毕业生人数比平均水平高7个百分点(在COVID-19大流行期间出现的情况 ) 。