Onsite At Marathon: Fill & Download for Free

Last summer, I was hired to do some on location costume design, fabrication and wardrobe styling for Microsoft. They were in town for a week and hired me for 5 days to stay onsite at their hotel during their launch, conference and arena show.I had my 14 year old son with me for the summer, so I told them he'd be with me the whole time, but was old enough to entertain himself. They were fine with that. The people I was working for had kids the same age.The first evening we had a design meeting, which my son attended and I would get started on everything the next morning.They set us up in a fancy hotel suite with a living room for sewing and said we could charge whatever food or drinks we wanted to the hotel room.On the first morning my son was completely amazed by the fabulous Nutella French Toast he got to order off the room service menu. He even posted it to his Facebook page saying “Best. Breakfast. Ever!”He thought he had died and gone to heaven!After breakfast, I went downstairs to start my day while he stayed in our glorious hotel room overlooking the lazy riven. I arranged for a friend to come over to hang out with him and he had a laptop, cell phone games, HBO, Lego, a resort swimming pool and other things to keep him occupied.During our morning meeting here's what happened:Boss Lady: “Where's your son?”Me: “Oh… he's upstairs enjoying his Nutella breakfast an angel delivered him from heaven. Then he's got his cell phone games, a laptop and tv, plus a friend is coming over to hang out with him”Boss Lady: “Well, That's not good enough! Would you mind if we gave him an Xbox and some games… he can keep everything too!”Me: “OMG, that would be amazing, he would love that!”We arranged a delivery to the room of an entire Xbox set up including a guy to hook everything up.I called my son and told him we had a surprise being delivered to the room for him so open the door and let them in.He thought he was getting a Nutella sandwich for lunch. LOLWhen my son opened the door to let the tech in and realized he was going to get to keep a brand new Xbox set up with games, a headset and more, he was shocked, amazed and literally started crying.It was the most generous gift he'd ever been given in his life.Here his is in gamer mode among piles of sewing supplies.Here's the costume I made for one of the executives among other things.As we pulled away from our 5 day sewing marathon for Microsoft and headed home, my son still couldn't believe the amazing time he had “in the trenches” with my mobile sewing crew and all the fun and gracious gifts he’d received.He made a comment about how blessed and lucky he seemed to be when he was with me and that “things like this never happen to dad!”.

Bill has given you some good leads. I'll describe how the intern programs I am aware of work.Internships are not posted on job listing sites or company web sites. Companies figure out how many interns they want and a general list of the kinds of skills those interns should have.They then travel to key schools (often classified as tier 1, 2 and 3 schools) during the intern season (the fall) and solicit interested parties to come and talk with them, en masse.There are a handful of managers from the companies in question who go to each campus -- and they do marathon interview sessions. At the end of it, although they haven't decided which roles the interns would fill in particular, they have decided who they would likely want to join the company for an internship the following summer (9 months in the future).Then the process varies. Some companies simply make internship offers to everyone that has passed this initial screening. Some companies then have a particular "hiring manager" back at the company reach out to key potential interns and do a final interview to determine fit and potential -- and those that pass this final hurdle get offers of an internship for the following summer.I realize this doesn't necessarily help you if you are not at one of the top tier schools (which, while they are not always the precisely same list for each company, as you can imagine, are many of the same schools from the perspective of the companies involved). But at least you have a sense of how this works.If you are in software engineering, there is a dearth of candidates, so even if you aren't at a top tier school, you may still find a good placement. If the companies you are interested are not coming to your school, you can reach out to the company in question and find out if they have a way to connect with their intern program, outside of the process I describe. Many will.In that case, Bill's suggestion to get active online in places you can be "found" and make "connections" is a good one. This can help bridge the gap. Getting involved in some open source projects is a good idea. And even figuring out a way to get onsite at some of the tier one schools for a single class, if nothing else, can help get you into the mix.

If people feel like consulting fellow coders (i.e. cheating, if we use proper names for things), I assure you, they will find a way to do it even in an hour-long contest. The only ways to avoid this completely is to hold competitions onsite and watch participants, or to allow people to unite in teams officially. However, it is usually assumed that people who take part in contests have some sense of diginty and won't cheat, and that in rare cases in which this doesn't hold the organizers can discover and ban the violators. At TopCoder Marathons, for example, I don't think collaboration has much place, especially among the top participants, though 2 weeks is more than enough time for communication.