While many college students headed this Summer to places like San Diego to take part in MTV's karaoke competition, some have chosen Seattle as their destination for an internship. In fact, it probably took three Boeing 747s to fly in Microsoft's internship team. Microsoft's college internship program, which is in its 13th year of existence, has attracted some 800 interns to the Redmond Campus this Summer. Nowadays, the trend seems to be for interns to be considered an equal member of the team - taking on a key project they can call their own. According to Microsoft's Director of HR David Pritchard, Microsoft's interns are assigned mainly to technical divisions and are involved in everything from writing and testing software to project management.
Some interns even get to take a product all the way through the shipping phase.
While Microsoft's interns received ownership of a specific project, Craig Cincotta, who is interning for the Seattle office of the PR firm Porter Novelli, has been literally receiving an overview of the entire Seattle internet industry . Cincotta, a Political Science and Communications major from the University of Massachusetts, took part recently in the TechViews 2000 event on the 76th floor of the Columbia Tower. Cincotta arrived in Seattle just one day after his last final and will be returning to campus for his Senior year just one day after the internship is over. Cincotta has no regrets about devoting the entire summer to his career ambitions. Although Cincotta has seen a lot of his peers drop out of school in order to pursue lucrative dotcom careers.