Internships should give you an opportunity to apply your ITP learning in ways outside the ordinary tracks of industry. Using internships to get credit for an ordinary job does not fulfill our educational mission and is a waste of your tuition. Instead you should seek out positions that might only be possible in the context of an internship. Here are some things to look for in an internship:
1) Does the internship allow you see the world as it could be rather than as it is.
2) Does the internship put you in contact with people (hopefully users) who are not like you and in environments that are not like yours.
3) Does it give you a warm feeling in your chest when you describe the good the work did for someone else.
Usually the most satisfying internship options are working in service to some non-profit organization with great possibilities to make some positive difference if they could just find someone with your skills. Another, less frequent scenario, is a company (think high margins) that uses interns to conduct their most far out research and pet projects because the cost of failure is low. In ordinary commercial contexts there is the classic internship of doing a job that no one would ever pay you for because you don’t yet seem qualified. If you choose to do an internship for credit, it requires a minimum of three hours per week per credit. You have to fill out this form and have it signed by your adviser. The adviser will decide if it meets the requirements of being an extraordinary position.