Google’s Internship Program Forced To Go Online

June 19, 2020 Off By Naveen Victor

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world on its head. The lockdowns that ensued, caused massive disruptions that have reverberated across business sectors. Companies including Google, were forced to shutter its offices and allow employees to work from home. This, created a unique problem for the Search giant’s annual internship program.

Since 1999, Google has conducted a summer internship program, where interns from across the world converge at Google’s office for 3 months. They work alongside Googlers on various projects that include open source ones. However, since we aren’t ‘out of the woods’ yet in regard to the COVID-19 issue, the company has chosen a different approach.

Credit: “Source: Google”

For the first time since the program’s inception, interns from across 43 countries will be expected to work virtually, from their own homes. The objectives and goals haven’t changed, but many technical internships will focus on open source projects. The downside here is that, they won’t have access to certain technical resources at Google’s office.

Open Source is a term used to describe a model that allows a product’s underlying code to be available for anyone to work on. Google considers itself a big contributor to open source projects, which include Android and Chromium. And in the last two decades, has released thousands of such projects, 2,600 of which are still active.

This year’s unique situation, caused a problem for the company. It needed projects and for Googlers who, together with the interns, to work on them. However, the team pulled together and came up with more than 1,000 potential projects. Interns will be able to work on TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Istio, Chromium and COVID-19 efforts like Data Commons and Covid Severity.