Using an internal internship to enhance computer science education in a two-year college

Abstract

A student internship in a suitable business or organization can augment, reinforce, and embellish material learned in the classroom. Computer Science student interns can experience such things as real-world development environments, projects which greatly exceed the scale of typical programming assignments, the utter importance of (possibly lacking) documentation, as well as diverse languages, operating systems, and hardware. Opportunities for such internships occur rarely, however, for many rural two-year colleges, especially those geographically isolated from companies which could provide this experience. Despite such a situation at our college, we still provide students with an internship experience by creating an internal organization: the Software Development Internship (SDI) with the mission to develop custom software for other departments on campus. In this paper we describe the formation of the SDI, its activities, and some of the benefits and lessons learned to date.