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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

February is a bit late for summer internships in my experience–most students have probably already accepted one already for fear of not having one over the summer.

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+1. It's a little insane how early the internship "season" is these days (I know interns who signed offers in Aug/Sept 2018 for summer 2019 internships).

Maybe YC & YC companies can bring some order to this internship arms race by establishing clear application/decision timelines for YC companies? My sense is February is too late, but September-October applications for November decisions might work well.

(Also, my company Clever still has one or two internship slots for 2019! https://clever.com/about/jobs/software-engineering-intern#gh...)

Can we just push deadlines back to December? That's around the same time as most college apps are due, and they're basically the same process.

From my experience, most of the August/September signings are return offers or chance encounters for people’s “dream” company, which they are happy to accept even if it limits their options. I think the bulk of internship hiring at large companies happens in November/December.

This is something I see startups miss a lot and I'm sometimes surprised they are able to get good interns. Usually by the end of October and especially by the end of November most good students already have an internship lined up at some big company and I see startups that I would consider pretty high caliber recruiting interns in February.

MIT has two main career fairs: Fall and Spring (April). Fall is best for Juniors and Spring is best for Sophomores/Freshman.

How’s the quality of the companies that show up? I’ve often seen that “good” companies are less like to show up for Spring career fairs.

The difference between MITs fall and spring career fair is night and day. For the fall career fair, there's usually a long line to the gym (most of the gym is used) if you don't get there early (or go later in the day but risk recruiters being tired). The spring career fair is much smaller and if I remember correctly it is mostly comprised of research based opportunities. There isn't much presence from SV software/tech companies. I think the fall career fair is about an order of magnitude larger than the spring one.

I wouldn't say an order of magnitude, probably about 3 times the size.

As a former student and then recruiter for the SV company types, the Spring career fair was pretty good at filling up the intern roster. Definitely the fall is much much better for full-time & junior candidates.

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