It was this one internship that I had where there was no formal process or program to guide me. At the time, it seemed like it was going to be a nightmare, I certainly imagined early on returning to my classmates with stories of disappointment, as there was almost no supervision, and everyone I worked with was way too busy to try to think of fun little toy projects for me to work on. I remember thinking it just didn't really seem like the program was very much of a "thing", however I ended up being very wrong and this one internship I'd consider to be the single most important experience for me as a developer.
In 2012 I got my first internship at Intel to work on post-Si validation for atom. I remember there being a huge amount of build up in my mind leading up to orientation, "What should I wear? Should I look up how to act?" etc... On orientation day, after all the usual cheerleading, all the other interns waited in a room for our managers to come pick us up and give us a tour. It felt like we were waiting to get new families. I saw each intern get picked up by smiling, charismatic managers, all happy to see them, one by one. My manager never came as he was too busy and I was told to just come back in the morning and I'd get a tour.
So the next day, I did, and our meeting seemed forced and hard for him, but he was really trying to make my internship seem like a "thing". Then all the interns who were in my section were given a tour of the lab and shown basically what they were working on, the different projects going at at the time. I remember being very concerned about what I was going to work on, what I was going to "be" so to speak, eagerly listening to every word, hoping to catch anything that would impress my superiors. Then there was one thing that caught my eye, a robotic arm, barely draped in a cloth, that just looked neglected.
After the lab tour and lunch, I met my mentor, a lead on the team, and we (me and two other interns) were to be assigned our work for the summer. This, it felt, was the moment I had been stressing over. They were each given duties, but when it came to me it felt like my mentor didn't really have anything in mind yet and so something inside of me just blurted out that I wanted to work on that robot that I saw in the lab. He told me a story about how it got to be that way and how no one was really in charge of it and that for now I could start just by figuring out how it worked and could take it from there.
I ended working there with almost complete ownership of my own project, just straight up coding non-stop, for what started out as the summer but then extended into a co-op that lasted until I graduated. Having something to work on, with very little structure, every day, was so much fun you wouldn't believe, and it was there that I developed the foundation for all of my programming skills.
I took that project from one machine that turned on but didn't do anything to two machines that could calibrate themselves, move through an arbitrary topology using pathfinding, pick up parts, take pictures of the different serial numbers and identify them in a database, and cycle through the remaining parts in the tray with very high accuracy. Each component in this ecosystem was networked so there had to be fail safes, like you don't try to move to the motherboard socket, if the actuator is already down, etc... and there were a lot of components. The only thing missing from this that would have made it a complete continuous integration system for Silicon was a test runner, which I would have had no idea what to do for back then. Any way, although I was a software intern, I even got to build a safety cage with an interlock, complete with a hardware-based fail-safe switch, for the robots, out of extruded aluminum! To be honest I didn't really know what I was doing the whole time, which is why it took me over a year to do this, but it was such an incredible learning experience that I will cherish it forever.
My manager, team, and everyone at Intel ended up being really awesome to work for and the internship was awesome, even if it wasn't a "thing", but hands down the best part of that experience was just figuring out what to do with myself and then becoming deeply and passionately absorbed by it and coding nonstop.