- The interns will work on projects to support COVID-19 response efforts
- Google also said that this year, many technical internships will focus on open source projects
Google has announced that that it’s summer internship program will be held this year as well despite the COVID-19 pandemic. It added that it will be held virtually and focus on WFH open source projects.
The company wrote in its blog, “This is the first year our summer internship program is virtual, but what it means to be an intern at Google hasn’t changed—we want our interns to have fun and make an impact on products that people use every day. Although many aspects of the program remain the same with interns working from home, we had to make some adjustments. Interns won’t have the benefit of working next to experienced Googlers in a traditional office environment, which in turn impacts the kinds of projects they can work on. Rather than cancel or postpone our program, we did what we’ve done many times before at Google—came up with a plan B”.
Projects to support COVID-19 response efforts
Google also said that this year, many technical internships will focus on open source projects. It added that open source is a model that makes a product’s underlying code available for anyone to work on. Even though interns didn’t have access to certain technical resources in a Google office, they could still contribute to meaningful projects.
It added, “Google has long been a big contributor to open source, and projects like Android and Chromium are now widely adopted around the world. Over the last two decades, Google has released thousands of open source projects, and ~2,600 are still active. Open source has always been about finding ways for people to build better things by working together, regardless of location. So it became a perfect fit for many of our remote, globally dispersed interns. ”
The tech giant said that in addition to contributing to Google-created projects like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Istio, Chromium, Apache Beam, and OSS-Fuzz, the interns will also work on projects to support COVID-19 response efforts. This includes integrating COVID-19 data into the Data Commons and contributing to the COVID Severity project.
