Career Fair follow-up

So as I mentioned earlier, UNH had its spring career fair a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I was busy with work and only made it to the last 20 minutes, not a good time to go as the recruiters have already talked to hundreds of students and are getting ready to leave. All was not lost, however, as I picked up some goodies such as a Red Hat hardcover notebook and a drawstring bag. I managed to make some contacts at Red Hat, OPNET, Fidelity, and some other ones. They were all looking for technical IT type students. Hopefully I will be able to get an internship at one of these places in the future.

For this coming summer, I am interning at Liberty Mutual, also for a technical position. I am very happy with the offer as it should be a great chance to gain experience and the pay is also quite generous as far as internships go, ($20/hour + $1000 stipend).

I've always thought it is wiser to start out at a well established firm in a traditionally strong sector. There is however a tradeoff, by taking this more conservative approach you are of course losing out on the excitement and potential pay outs of working at a younger company, perhaps the next red hot startup. For internships, I think the firm you are at doesn't really matter as long as the job itself provides a learning opportunity and the chance to gain valuable experience.
     Even for technical internships I always try to find out what interns spend most of their time doing, is it a lot of irrelevant busy work? It can be quite tricky to extract this sort of information, one cannot simply ask if interns get lots of busy work, that would be career suicide. I usually ask what skills they want in their interns, what a typical day is like, how to get the most out of the internship. If the recruiter responds vaguely to what skills are needed, that may be a sign that not much technical work is involved. Of course it may be just an uninformed recruiter.

Do you have any tricks for getting information out of recruiters or general tips for the internship search and interview process? Please leave a comment if you do, looking forward to hearing from you.