Our students are required to hold an internship at some point during their Bonaventure CS career (typically in their junior or senior year). Here they have an opportunity to share their experiences at their internship, describe what knowledge they learned at St. Bonaventure they applied to their assigned tasks and reflect on what they learned.
Overall I found my experience at Paychex to be very positive and extremely beneficial to my career. This first hand experience provided insight about what the day to day life of a software developer is like at a large (publicly owned) company. Coding standards, peer review and integration testing all seems so foreign from a student's perspective. Granted we learn best practices and to test our code with JUnit (or something similar), but this only goes so far. In the real world you become part of a team, working on a real project that is usually too large for a single person to tackle. In order to make the most of the opportunities given to me at Paychex I had to ask questions. No longer could I be the “hotshot” that took on challenges alone. Along with the Linux experience I think that was the biggest takeaway, to stop being so stubborn.
I would definitely recommend others to apply at Paychex for an interning experience.
The people there are great, the City of Rochester has plenty to do and the experience itself is priceless.