Re:Summer Vacation
by nostrademons on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:03AM
(#22954)
Am I the only one who liked my summer jobs? I've had one all but two summers, since my junior year of high school. They were (grr, I wish news.YC had Markdown...):
1999: Did a website for a local town newspaper
2000: Worked for an all-teenage venture funded dot-com (yeah, it was that easy to come by funding during the bubble).
2001: InstallShield scripting for said dot-com's parent company. (2000/2001 bookended a "gap year" between high school and college, so I was working there all year, with various projects.)
2002: Worked for a contract programming shop.
2003: Summer off - spent it learning Lisp and Dylan, attempting the ICFP programming contest (didn't finish), starting an Eclipse plugin for Dylan (didn't finish), and designing the database schema for FictionAlley.org (eventually did finish, but it wasn't till 2005).
2004: Worked for a financial software startup that eventually became my full-time employer.
2005: Summer off. Spent it finishing up FictionAlley.org. Well, that and going on a cruise.
If I had to rank the years from best to worst, it would probably be 2000, 2001, 1999, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2005. Two of the three worst were the years that I had no job, while all of the best involved a job of some sorts.
I suspect it's because when I had an internship, I spent the summer learning new technologies, which is exactly the same thing I would've been doing without an internship. However, with the internship, I a.) got paid b.) usually completed a project or 3, and c.) had people around me. When I was working on my own stuff, none of those were a given.
1999: Did a website for a local town newspaper
2000: Worked for an all-teenage venture funded dot-com (yeah, it was that easy to come by funding during the bubble).
2001: InstallShield scripting for said dot-com's parent company. (2000/2001 bookended a "gap year" between high school and college, so I was working there all year, with various projects.)
2002: Worked for a contract programming shop.
2003: Summer off - spent it learning Lisp and Dylan, attempting the ICFP programming contest (didn't finish), starting an Eclipse plugin for Dylan (didn't finish), and designing the database schema for FictionAlley.org (eventually did finish, but it wasn't till 2005).
2004: Worked for a financial software startup that eventually became my full-time employer.
2005: Summer off. Spent it finishing up FictionAlley.org. Well, that and going on a cruise.
If I had to rank the years from best to worst, it would probably be 2000, 2001, 1999, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2005. Two of the three worst were the years that I had no job, while all of the best involved a job of some sorts.
I suspect it's because when I had an internship, I spent the summer learning new technologies, which is exactly the same thing I would've been doing without an internship. However, with the internship, I a.) got paid b.) usually completed a project or 3, and c.) had people around me. When I was working on my own stuff, none of those were a given.