One of the best decisions I made was to go to Drexel University for my undergraduate degree, because they basically require everyone to go on internships. You get your degree in 5 years, but for the middle three years you alternate between 6 months of class and 6 months of paid internship. Drexel even had a required class for all freshmen to teach you how to write a resume, how to interview, how to act at work, etc.
So in 1995, my sophomore year in college, I went to work at my first internship for a small consulting company called Gnostech. I remember in the interview they asked me:
Do you ever work on programming projects on the side just for fun?
("Yes, I’m working on an online game. I haven’t decided whether it will be set in medieval times or outer space, so I’m trying to be as generic as possible.")Do you know the difference between C and C++?
("Not really, they look the same, but I know in C++ you can change around how the operators work.").
I guess those answers were good enough for them, so they marked me down as a "qualified alternate" and I somehow got the job.
Gnostech was a typical small company, and they did all kinds of various computer stuff for other companies in the area - which actually made it a fantastic place to do an internship. One day I might be installing a network, another day I’d be soldering components onto circuit boards, another day I was writing software to test the circuit boards.