How to get the perfect internship ? ! ! ?

CONFESSION 

"Getting an internship is sometimes more difficult than getting a Job"

Get an internship specially when you are just a sophomore/third year student is like task equivalent of cutting a Gordian knot.

Issues which a normal student might face while looking for an internships are :-

1.) Most companies do not offer 2 months internship. They offer it for 6 months

2.) Lack of skill set in sophomores or lack of proper guidance like failing to apply on right time.

3.) Zero contacts in industry or no god father in your life to form a platform for you to walk.

4.) Unaware of the fact which field interests you more.

I faced all these issues in at least one year each while pursuing my graduation. And now when I look back I realize that there was hardly any need to get so apprehensive about this entire process of getting an internships.

So following are the ways which might help you to do/learn something meaningful

1.) GETTING AN INTERNSHIP VIA THE CAMPUS ITSELF

Most of the companies which when visit the campus for recruitment session also allow the third year students to appear for the exam too on a different/same day keeping the question paper same. Plus they give some stipend. And if you work really good they might even offer you pre-placement offer (also known as PPO), which is pretty good and saves you from facing the intense competition of the placement session.

2.) DO RESEARCH BASED PROJECT WITH YOUR COLLEGE PROFESSOR

I was lucky that somebody gave me this advice when I was a sophomore but ignorant enough to pay no heed to the suggestion. Because I was dying to know how professionals work.I wanted to experience something new rather than pursuing another project under the guidance of my professor. This was one of the worst mistake of my engineering life. If you realize that you are not getting an internship from the campus itself and there is no chance to get the same because of any reason - lack of preparation etc start looking for professor who might consider to guide you, while you pursue a project under the prof's guidance. If you are not interested in research for an algorithm or if your interests is totally aligned with programming then you can tell your professors the same. Sometimes they have seniors/PHD students working under their guidance who are also looking for programmers because of lack of time to implement the algorithm or it never hurts to have a helping hand.

If your college does not have such provision of promoting the research work you can look for nearby good colleges or contact PHD students of those colleges via linkedin or facebook.

3.) JOIN A STARTUP

This is the best you can do.Your knowledge will increase exponentially. Additionally you will experience how computer engineers work. Now if you are wondering how to contact the right start up, I am going to suggest a few ways via which you can know about the upcoming start up around your area. My favorite is "The Economic Times". Even if you are not a newspaper person or haven't subscribed to the newspaper itself, you can go to their website and look for "Biz & entrepreneurship" section to get a list of new and upcoming start ups. Next you can look for sites like letsintern or hellointern .Go to the respective website of the startups and look for Job or career or Join Us section. You can send them a mail with your resume and a good enough SOP. You will most certainly receive a response. But make sure to have a good command over at least one programming language and send mail to at least 10 startups.

4.) SOLVE A PROBLEM OF YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD/COLLEGE/CLASSMATES

This is the best you can do for your community. This help you improve not only your technical skills but also skills like problem solving and team-management if you can motivate other to work with you as a team for the cause. 

The million dollar question here is how to find an appropriate problem to target. I would just like to give you some ideas like 

• Say you feel that there can be a portal where students can upload their notes/links/past year question paper etc. You can design a website on similar involve. You might implement the       project using latest technologies like MongoDB and python rather than conventional PHP and MySql.
• You can make a college app which will enlist the upcoming events/talks or the reminder system of classes.Try to make use of Sencha framework.
•  Organize a hackathon. If you feel that you can help others than you can pick a topic like C++   library or Python web scrapping library. Organize a meet up where you can first teach these       skills and then see if your batch mates come up with an innovative idea around the same.
• Last but not the least and this is my favorite too. Make a Chrome or Mozilla extension. Explore APIs of various upcoming products and enhance their functionality by making a chrome       extension.
• Add a twist in conventional projects. There are numerous sites where the conventional and easy to make projects like online library system, hospital management, car rental or chat server are available. Try to add something new and innovative in these system. For ex: I made a conventional examination system and the students performance was measured not in an absolute manner but with respect to how to peers performed and how to the teacher performed in the same test. And as one of my other internship program I made a Content Management System where not even the header of the website was hard coded. Everything was stored in the database and only the CSS part was written rest everything was retrieved by querying the database and the user interface was such that even a non-technical person could add or delete articles with any prior training.

I hope these points will help you in creating something innovative and out of the box rather than looking for internships which in the first place waste your time to contact the right person and secondly, 90% times are not as good as you expect them to be.