Interns: Everything you need to know about a summer in the Bay Area in one place
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Get a place in Berkeley or the nicer places in Oakland and you'll have a great experience and can BART into the city in 15 minutes.
Sounds like you've got some experience with this - are there any particular places you'd recommend? When I was an intern in SF (2011), I lived in Glen Park, which was a half/hour bike ride/couple of BART stops away from work, and I ended up paying slightly over $1,100. I had friends that went and found more distant housing, but we didn't see them all that much/they didn't get nearly as much out of the summer as we did, beyond their company.
A lot (most?) internship salaries include a $1,000 housing stipend, so it ends up being not all that crazy; neither of my internships had more than 25% of income go to housing.
Can you speak to your experience in particular? I haven't met a lot of people who followed your strategy, but I'd love to incorporate the perspective of somebody who did.
Prices has gone up but it seems like people have gotten worse at finding places or switched to using airbnb more (which is way more expensive).
East bay near BART is also good if your internship is in the city.
Temescal. Macarthur BART has lots of trains to the city and assuming you're going somewhere near a station (like Twitter or Google SF) it's ~ 20 minutes. Strong hipster vibe, and an explosion of restaurants, bike shops, funky secondhand stores, etc. in the last 10 years. Neighborhood is still rough in patches, but rapidly improving. Stay to the North and East of Macarthur BART and you're fine.
Downtown Berkeley. Safe Neighborhood. Lots of young people about, plenty of restaurants. Things tend to close up earlier than in the city. Commute is slightly longer than to Temescal, but the Richmond trains tend to be emptier and so you almost always get a seat.
If you work at Google SF or anywhere downtown, look into the AC Transit Transbay Buses. They are slightly more expensive than BART ($4.20 a ride, last I checked) but you get free Wifi, great views, clean, comfortable coach seats, and nonstop service. That opens up a LOT more territory, albeit mostly away from the concentrations of culture.
But all that said, you're right, SF is the place to be if you can afford it. Don't try to save money as an intern. What you earn during that time is a drop in the bucket, ultimately, and you're only young once. But if you have a crew of people you want to live with, the Easy Bay can be a great bet, and you can spend what you save on trips out of town.
If interns team up they can maybe get a short term lease at one of the many south bay housing complexes (Archstone, Avalon, Prometheus, Irvine Company). Most are horrible landlords and several charge ridiculous, but understandable, rent increases if you are shorter term - however, if you're prepared to share and lay out on furniture, it could be a saving over the course of a summer. Plus, could get lucky and find a relocating person or off-season intern to hand off to at the end of summer.
Living in Berkeley is not a good choice if your internship is in the South Bay. Even if your job is accessible by BART, Berkeley near a BART station is not inexpensive. The nice areas of Oakland are similarly expensive and the not-nice areas of Oakland are a few orders of magnitude more dangerous than the rest of the Bay Area. I used to live in an "affordable" part of Berkeley and had to spend about an hour each way getting to work with walking on both sides + BART. Berkeley and parts of Oakland like Rockridge have their charms, but I do not recommend them if you have the option of living closer to work.
I'm not too scared of crime, I have guns and grew up in a lower class neighborhood, but am worried about theft when I'm not home.
edit: I would basically like to live in a neighborhood like Pilsen in Chicago. Affordable, working class, mexican, and close to transit. Any recommendations?
OTOH, I live in Oakland and drive. I've never gone to anything in Oakland except Amazon locker pickup, Whole Foods (but prefer Berkeley places), and the 580/880 onramps. I step into my car in an underground garage and essentially don't get out until I'm in the civilized/Promised Land (Peninsula).
Berkeley is also maybe more fun as an intern, even if you work in SF, and has BART. I'm not sure what summer housing is like there -- I'd assume there are vacancies in places rented to students during the year over the summer.
Nitpicking: Piedmont is an enclave contained within Oakland (but independent), but Rockridge is part of Oakland. (it's also "Adams Point", not Adam's Point)
Edit: it's hard to compare places in the Bay Area to Chicago neighborhoods. There are plenty of hispanic areas near public transport. They aren't like Pilsen, though. The word "affordable" also doesn't mean the same thing.
I guess I'll just have to walk around and explore for a few days.
The crime problem is pretty bad and getting worse. Most of the murders, 126 last year and 3 just this past weekend, are gang-related and localized to West and East Oakland ("the Flats"). The safer parts of town are North Oakland, near Berkeley, and the Hills.
Per capita, Oakland is the nation's #1 city for robberies, #1 for vehicle thefts, #3 for violent crime, and #4 for murders. Oakland has only 15 police officers per 10,000 residents, half as many as SF and one-third as many NYC and Chicago.
Oakland is depressing because the city has so much potential. It is centrally located in the Bay Area; close to SF by BART, car, and ferry; has an international airport; and has a large shipping port. But many big employers are scared away by crime, so people have to leave Oakland to work or shop, further depressing the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_...
Well, plenty of people live there and all, but a few visits combined with Wikipedia [1] have convinced me that I don't particularly want to live there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...
The rest of the city has plenty of natural beauty, affordable living, central location, interesting + diverse people, great food, gorgeous weather and fun nightlife.
> worried about theft when I'm not home.
Wow, true U.S. citizen's problems. I wouldn't even think about crime rates or the need to carry a gun when looking for a place to stay. Come to Europe, it's better.
I'm living in West Oakland right now. My rent is 1/3 the cost of an equivalent room in SF, and my commute is shorter (7 minute BART ride). I feel perfectly safe.
If you're working in the South Bay, yeah, don't live there. But Temescal, for example, is a great option if you're working in the city. Great city feel, lots of cool stuff, and you're still only 20 minutes from the city. That's a shorter commute than many parts of the city itself. It's expensive my national standards, but still cheaper than the city.
That said, I don't think crime is the main reason to not live in the East Bay when you are doing an internship. Minimizing transport time to work and/or recreation is why you don't want to live out there. If you are working in SF, live in SF. If work is in the south bay, live in the south bay...or maybe live in SF. It will be expensive but an internship should cover it. If the internship doesn't cover it you picked the wrong internship.
The most important thing is to live near other interns. If everyone's in the city, live in the city. If you want to get a house with a few people, or just prefer a more laid-back vibe, the East Bay is a great option.
As for the crime in Oakland, some guy got shot in front of his own house in the Mission this morning. People arriving for their internships, not being familiar with SF neighborhoods, shouldn't get the impression that the Mission is some kind of picnic.
I don't deny that you can get cheaper outside of SF/MTV (and indeed SF can be much more expensive; my comment is only for MTV), but I dont think that $1200 is 'trust fund' money.
"If you don’t mind living further away from one of the central locations, you’ll be able to pay half as much for rent for a nicer place than you could afford otherwise (see heat map).
Saving money is great and all..."
For lots of people, saving money isn't "great and all." It's required. Especially if you happen to be an intern living in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
34% of my salary is going to rent and I get to live in the heart of SF, in SoMa. The place is gorgeous and the location is safe.
It just takes some effort to find a good place.
As a high school junior going out to the Bay Area this summer to work, I agree with a lot of the advice for high schoolers. From my own experiences, I would add these little bits:
- Completely disregard age requirements when applying. If a company denies you because of your age, then just apply to another company.
- Avoid the conventional application process whenever possible. If the company has a job posting anywhere, always take the approach of reaching out to the employee who wrote it, instead of going through the generic application page. You are not a conventional applicant, and this approach allows you to stand out.
- Avoid the conventional interview process whenever possible. Not many high schoolers are exposed to courses on algorithms in a conventional class setting, which tough interview challenges are based upon. Find a company that hires in a more progressive fashion where they instead hand you a coding challenge or ask you to explain certain concepts. These interviews are the key to getting you hired, because they allow you to demonstrate your programming ability, knowledge and communication skills all in one. Focus on knocking these interviews out of the park, and removing any doubt from their minds.
- Do not mention your age anywhere highly visible. Not on your Github, not on your Twitter and especially not on your resume. Even though I wish it weren't the case, age can be an immediate turn off to possible employers. Once you have a communication channel open, however, be sure to mention your age.
- Focus on marketing yourself. Don't only churn out side projects, but also write about them, demonstrate them at tech meetups, submit them to central repositories, etc. Maintain a blog, writing about the things you work on. Maintain public profiles on social networking sites, listing yourself as a freelance developer. This comes in handy when employers are questioning your legitimacy from the get go. From doing this, I actually attracted employers to myself and got a few job offers from prominent companies. Even though I had to deny them all, I asked the recruiters if they had summer positions available, many of which did. If this ever happens to you, make sure to ask the recruiter how they found you.
Interning at big guys like Microsoft or Google is almost entirely unheard of. School never even told about the possibility of being asked technical questions during an interview; interviews are supposed to be a 15 minute conversation about ourselves and about the company. We're always assumed to get an interview. "Startups may hire only one or two interns" is normal, companies hiring more than that are extremely rare, and if they do it's usually because they're too poor to pay real employees. In fact, 3/4 companies I've been with hired interns because they're (very) cheap.
So that means no pay. Not that I'm looking for wages, I'm looking to learn something, but still. It turns out the better companies also pay more (or at all), but I only learned that very recently. I never even knew it was customary to get a monetary compensation for your work until a year ago. It became most obvious when I was (almost solely) working on code for mission-critical systems without payment...
- Yeah, you get paid a large sum of money, but it really doesn't matter. The $7k/month salary may sound like a ton as a college student, but it isn't. It will pale in terms of your life earnings. Focus on trying out new areas / technologies that you think you might be interested in, but aren't sure. An internship is a chance to try something new out. If you don't like it, you just don't accept their return offer, there's no expectation that you'll continue to work at the company beyond 3 months.
- Do NOT intern at the same place more than once. They will try to lure you back by giving you a deadline of 2 weeks after your internship ends. This is BS. If they were willing to give you a return offer, they will almost certainly wait for you to get your other offers back. Competition is too stiff for them not to do this. Interning at the same place twice yields diminishing returns: you'll be working with the same tech, not meeting new people and learning new tricks. Plus, you won't get to experience more company cultures, finding out where you fit.
- Don't even consider interning part time during the school year. The pay will seem appealing, but it will take away from your college experience. You only go to college once, you should enjoy it to its fullest, you have your whole life to work. Again, money is insignificant compared to your life earnings.
- Interning in the Valley is a rite of passage, but after you've done one internship there, consider other places. NYC is great, I live there and highly recommend it (shameless plug, you can read about why at my blog post: [1]). Boston is great too, lots of biotech startups. Overseas is also a good choice, since you'll get the experience of living in another culture, in addition to doing cool work.
I'll end with another shameless plug. I work for Palantir, a really great company that's growing extremely rapidly and working on some pretty cool projects across a variety of spaces: government, healthcare, local law enforcement, finance to name a few. We've also done some kickass philanthropy efforts, such as our work with Hurricane Sandy: [2]. I've only worked at Palantir full-time, but several of my friends have interned here, and said it's the best place they've interned. If you're interested in interviewing with us (for either fulltime or internship), please email me at <firstname>.g.<lastname> [at] gmail.
[1] http://michael-g-miller.tumblr.com/post/20168723440/why-i-ch...
Unless you want to work there after school, in which case returning is a very good idea, because the whole point of the returning internship pool is recruitment.
> Don't even consider interning part time during the school year. The pay will seem appealing, but it will take away from your college experience. You only go to college once, you should enjoy it to its fullest, you have your whole life to work. Again, money is insignificant compared to your life earnings.
There are lots of reasons other than money to intern part-time during the school year. It provides an outlet to do real-world work and build relationships that will matter for years to come after you've graduated.
The interns who continued to work in some part-time capacity when I was at Apple (and who continued to make solid technical contributions) were almost invariable hired.
> Interning in the Valley is a rite of passage, but after you've done one internship there, consider other places. NYC is great, I live there and highly recommend it
The company in question and the work you're doing matters as much or more than the location you're in. Obviously, you want to live somewhere nice, but if you want to work at a specific company, then that should be what drives your internship decisions.
(samples: Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple)
Even if not in Seattle, the difference between $6k and $8.5k is negligible for a 3 month internship relative to your life earnings.
However, It's only negligible if it doesn't correlate linearly with a starting salary.
If my starting salary is 20% lower at Amazon than anywhere else, you can bet I won't be returning after my internship.
Apple pays even more if you're willing to pull a lot of overtime.
The pit in my stomach is me remembering interns traditionally get like a 50% boost in wages when they are hired on.
Apple for example for 1-3 years experience.
http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Apple-Software-Engineer-S...
Agreed for undergrads, but part-time internships are great if you're doing a masters. I spent an academic year doing research (most people did their masters thesis research in 1-4 months of full-time work) while I worked part-time at the same place I did my summer internship. Industry pay let me make a phd's salary (i.e. just enough to eke by) with just 12 hours a week of work. It was the best year of my life. I had plenty of free time to enjoy and improve myself (I got in great shape, met interesting people, read a lot) when it was socially acceptable to live like that.
BTW I completely agree on NYC. Moving here from the west coast has its costs, but has been one of the most personally enriching decisions I've ever made.
Before I was lucky enough to land my first internship I worked for eBay as a customer service representative. While they had tuition reimbursement the job was so stressful that I felt it was a major detriment to my education. Jobs like this also don't care about your schooling or life outside of work.
Finally getting to program on the job and solve real world problems has been a change of pace. Your co-workers and management actually give you space, a chance to breathe, and respect that you have full time school outside of work. Working during school hasn't been half bad.
So, respectfully I disagree with your third point. I agree on the other points though.
Really? All the advice I've heard anywhere else said it's extremely important to do as many internships as possible before graduating. And 7k a month? I thought internships were unpaid.
If you want an apartment in this city you must bid several hundred over the listed price. It is also extremely common to offer 3-6 month's rent down and be ready to cut that check at the open house.
That being said, commuting in the South Bay is a little painful without a car. But riding the VTA is extremely affordable and will get you to your destination, albeit a little slowly.
MS actually has the Explore Microsoft internship for underclassmen. [1]
I'd also suggest adding Yegge's Blogpost on "Get That Job at Google" to required interview reading [2]. It's an excellent resource for applying to any company that highly weights core CS topics in their interviews, regardless of whether you're applying for an internship or full-time employ.
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[1]: http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/internships-explo...
[2]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Is education significant among startups, and how can I maximize the allure of my resume vis-a-vis my education (or lack thereof)?
A few additional points in regards to the comments below:
1. For those asking about international opportunities it may be good to check out this Quora post on how to get a visa and which startups hire international students: http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-willing-to-sponsor-a...
2. For those discussing locations I generally agree with the authors points that SF, MV, and PA are best given proximity to events. That said we and many of the companies we work with, have had success with interns living in Berkeley. It is an easy BART stop, has lots of college housing which usually means 4-5 in a house and a lower cost, and while some crime does exist, it is avoidable with common sense and precaution. Since most events are during happy hour times, living in Berkeley definitely does not preclude you from participating in a lot of good events.
3. Additional posts I (and I know many interns we have talked to in the Bay) would love to see include: -How to develop a mentor within a startup? -How to get the attention of startup founders on social media? -The importance of an online portfolio.
4. A couple additional tips I would share with students is that you should recognize that companies and founders are always time-crunched, but always interested in quality talent. Following-up with applications multiple times (and on multiple channels like Facebook or Quora) is always a good idea as long as you are non-spammy and enthusiastic. Same is true during an internship, embrace the hectic life-style, stay positive, over-deliver and remember to stay in touch with people (possibly with thank you cards) after the internship ends. Startups come and go so a full-time job is never guaranteed but your network can become even more important. Here are a few more posts along these lines: http://www.internmatch.com/blog/category/mastering-summer-in...
5. Startups are a lot of work but also a lot of fun. Always keep an open mind about your internship, make friends with not just those in your company but students and startup people you meet outside of it and have a great time!
Thanks internproject.io team for such an in-depth knowledge center for interns. Excited to read and learn more about the events and resources you have coming up
I'd be curious if Palo Alto similarly gets cheaper during the summer.
"Finding an Internship", "Finding an Internship" "Choosing an Internship", "Choosing an Internship"
Is that intentional? Kinda confused me at first.
Also -- are many American companies friendly towards Canadians who happen to have dual citizenship? To be honest ideally I'd work in Waterloo or Toronto (both are driving distance, ish, from my home) but I'd love to spend time in NYC or the Bay Area too.
I'm talking about anything north of Montague between the Guadalupe and Coyote Creek, and south of 237. North of 237 I'd call Alviso, and that's a whole different thing.
I think it's worth noting that Palo Alto is not very much of a college town at all.
Specifically - any tips on securing an apartment ahead of time, possibly remotely? I have a week in the corporate apartment, but if I could line something up beforehand that would be preferred.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/groups/210814239033807/?bookmark_t=...
I learned computer science a lot later than many of my peers, I stumbled around a lot in the startup world before being able to intern at one of the more well-known companies in the valley- this was only after I had learned many lessons and been rejected or not even contacted by many companies because I didn't know how to present myself in a format that made recruiters want to contact me.
Any resource that helps potential interns to learn more about recruiting in the valley- from finding an internship to choosing an internship- is a good one.
In my experience, it's about an hour one-way, so two hours daily. Assuming SF-PA-SF, express Caltrain, ~10m walk on each end.
Plus, hanging out on weekends is easier when you're around other (out-of-town) interns, and they will likely be living in {MTV, PA, MP, SJ, SF}.
If you've had a bad experience, you could write a blog post about it and send it to the maintainers -- maybe they'll include it as a guest post.