So you would like an internship at Northern.tech you say?
Great! Let's get you started.
First you have to apply! This is done through any number of channels. You can apply from our website: www.northern.tech. Even better, maybe you know one of us? Someone might say at the quiz on friday: "we are looking for an intern".
The interview
Then after having signaled your interest, wait patiently for a few weeks, and prepare for the first stage Skype interview. Sounds scary to you? No worries. Thomas (The company C.E.O) will show up wearing a sweatshirt, and save the HR questions for another time. Simply keep your calm and tell him all about your good sides, and a little bit about your not so good sides. Then, Thomas will take you through a quick description of the company. Finally at the very end of the interview he will tell you that one of the engineers will contact you with a home assignment. This will then be the second part of the interview.
If your C-skills are a little bit out of date, a quick refresher might be in place, as the assignment will probably take you the better part of a day or two either way. Even if your weekly schedule is packed, having it assigned over the weekend is not a problem.Or as the engineers will say: "No problem! This is not a timed exam."
Once you feel that your assignment is worthy a review by the company engineers, hand it in and wait for a week or so, before the last and final stage of the interview process - the on-prem interview. Appareantly your assignment is not only worthy of review by one, but three Northern.tech engineers, ready to disassemble your hand-in piece by piece after a quick coffee and questionaire. After a couple of hours your are now done, and filled with hope and promise for the coming summer.
A couple of weeks in suspense, and you are contacted with a congratulation and an offer for the internship. Congratulations!
Let the fun begin!
A few weeks then passes with exams and other school related stuff taking up most of your time. But, as is commonly known, time cannot be stopped. Suspense is slowly building, as you are contacted with questions regarding the technical gear you will be using this summer. Since you are a sensible guy, and the Lenovo Thinkpad t470s is a good P.C. Dell has a good and reasonable monitor, and you are a little bit shy (this might be your first internship after all), you decide that these are sensible defaults.
Another week passes. The day is here, and you set five alarms. One shall not be late for the first day at work! The first thing that will meet you is (probably) the face of Kristian - neckbeard extraordinaire and programming afficionado. He has been assigned your mentor for the summer (lucky you). Just like everything Kristian does; mentorships are done proper!
Later in the day Marcin will come into the office. He is the second and last part of the client team for mender. The Over-The-Air (OTA) updater for embedded devices that you will be working on this summer. Marcin - a happy and balanced polac - claims to be the weakest programmer on the team (except you of course), yet he has no problem tearing your pull requests apart, and you start suspecting that he is simply being shy (he is).
As the summer progresses, and you slowly advance up the developer totem-pole. This means that you will start off with fixing a bunch of simple bugs from the backlog (think: an if missing etc). Then later on, as your skills and knowledge of the codebase (this takes some time) grows, you will be assigned to incrementally bigger and bigger tasks. And by the end of the summer you might be lucky enough to implement a feature all on your own. There will definitely be a lot of tools that you have heard about previously, that you will now get to play with in an industrial setting (docker, docker-compose, amazon-s3, digital-ocean, git, jenkins, travis, and a whole bunch of others).
If you are socially inclined, the chance to join the Northern.tech summer summit will be a chance to get to know all the guys from the company a lot better. The summit is a week long gathering in some cabin the company will rent., and most of the guys from the different company offices fly in to join (U.S, east and west).
Now after having spent two months as Marcin and Kristian's (and all the other guys at Northern.tech's) Bonzai tree, your summer internship has come to an end, and you are left feeling a bit hollow. Luckily you are now many times the programmer you were when you started, and if you are lucky, you might even be allowed to extend your internship into a job on the side of your studies.
Though maybe not the exact recipe for an internship at Northern.tech, it should be plenty to get you started.
Good luck :)