Student Benefits of Internship

Upgrade your engineering internship.

Keep working on campus during the school year.

(Are you recruiting? Check out the corporate benefits)

Summer internships are great, but you and your company usually have to split up at the end of the summer. Keep up your relationship by working for them while you’re back at school. Prairiefire helps by hosting and mentoring at the Illinois Research Park. (And we can also help your company set up shop at the Research Park.)

Summer internships are great, but...

During a typical internship you make good money, get to know the company, and figure out how you like that flavor of engineering. But the summer isn't that long - you end up spending a lot of it learning the system instead of engineering.

It's rare to get truly challenging, in-depth engineering projects during a summer internship.

Now take it to the next level.

Continuing your internship on-campus lets you take it to the next level. Prairiefire hosts and mentors you while you’re at school and working part-time for your company, on your company's projects, with your company's engineers. Undergrads typically work 10 hours/week and grads 20 hours/week.

The whole time, you’re still working for your company. You get to learn from bigger, more challenging projects while getting paid and improving your resume.

Your company gets more real, money making work from you since you already know their system and keep getting better.

And you both get to keep an eye on each other for a job after graduation.

Read the FAQ

Get a job (and other benefits)

82% of interns we've worked with accepted a full-time position at the company they interned with (way above the average for other intern programs).

But wait, there’s more!

Engineer for longer than three months at a time.
Improve yourself with in-depth projects.
Unique resume advantage.
Connect the classroom and real world.
Network deeper into your company.
Make money with flexible hours.
Escape the yearly internship search.

What to Expect

The specifics are different for every company. Here’s what to expect:

Go to your summer internship.
Want to continue on campus? Give us a call and talk to your boss.
We'll all get together and work out the details.

For your supervisor

Need something to hand your supervisor?

Here you go: Printable info-sheet [PDF]

Why would a company want this?

Companies like this set-up because you’re more productive, better at what you do, and able to impress them before they risk offering you a full time job. Once you have the job, you’re more experienced and productive than any other new hire.

Here’s how your company sees the benefits:

Cut the waste of re-recruiting.
Interns learn it, do it, and teach it to the next wave.
Experienced, productive interns all year round.
Gauge performance for years before a job offer.
Hire experienced engineers, not unproven grads.
Better new hire retention and better job fit.

Your company helps cover the program costs and pays for your space and our time. They also take care of your hardware and software needs to keep things nice for IT and the lawyers.

Why's Prairiefire doing this?

We help companies set up their own on-campus intern programs but we're also here to help you, the students. We can't talk to every company but we do want to talk to YOUR company. Prairiefire employees created and developed the first and largest corporate internship program in the University of Illinois Research Park, with hundreds of year-round interns employed in the last decade.

All of us at Prairiefire have benefited from being mentored and we value passing those benefits on to others.

What Do Students Think?

We’ve worked with many students over the years. Here are some thoughts from interns in our past programs:

“Flexible work hours during classes and vacations helped me earn funds for school and I got to work engineering projects that summer-only interns were never considered for.”

-Ken H.

“I had quite a few ah-ha moments. My classes made more sense, I’d already seen it in the real world.”

-Melanie W.

“Because I had the option of finishing my project in Champaign, my boss trusted me with a meatier problem.”

-Erica D.

“[My mentor] unselfishly took his time to explain important engineering principles to me, as they applied to specific projects at work, to classes, and to engineering in general. He is not only a brilliant engineer, but also a great teacher.”

-Elizabeth J.

“I had the confidence to challenge the outdated tools that were in place in my current group and successfully applied the skills I learned in school to create more powerful and efficient methods in my first year working full-time."

-Kyle H.