As COVID-19 spread across the world this spring, in-person classes and graduation ceremonies were cancelled.
The soon-to-be interns surely wondered if their summer at Google would be affected.
Google, therefore, decided to host their internship program virtually and since then, thousands of interns have joined from their homes in 43 countries around the world.
This is the first year the summer internship program is virtual, but what it means to be an intern at Google hasn’t changed—they want their interns to have fun and make an impact on products that people use every day.
Work From Home Adjustments
- Interns won’t have the benefit of working next to experienced Googlers in a traditional office environment, which in turn impacts the kinds of projects they can work on.
- This year, many technical internships will focus on open source projects. Open source is a model that makes a product’s underlying code available for anyone to work on, so even though interns don’t have access to certain technical resources in a Google office, they can still contribute to meaningful projects.
- The interns will tackle projects to support COVID-19 response efforts, including integrating COVID-19 data into the Data Commons and contributing to the Covid Severity project.
- The resources invested to support these interns and the contributions they make demonstrates the strength of Google’s commitment to the open source community.
Today, they have more than 1,000 technical interns actively contributing to open source projects.
Although most of their internships are only three months, they look forward to seeing how these projects will progress with the help of their interns.
Source: Google