Google’s summer internships go virtual

Many technical internships at Google will focus on open source projects this year

Google has announced that their summer internship program will go ahead despite the pandemic, albet virtually.

The program this summer is focused on WFH open source projects. Google’s summer internship program dates back to 1999 and is already underway.

“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”, Google revealed in its blog.



This year, many technical internships at Google will focus on open source projects. Open source is a model that makes a product's underlying code available for anyone to work on, so even though interns didn't have access to certain technical resources in a Google office, they could still contribute to meaningful projects.

Google has long been a big contributor to open source, and projects like Android and Chromium are now widely adopted around the world.

Interns will contribute to Google-created projects like TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Istio, Chromium, Apache Beam, and OSS-Fuzz and also interns undertake projects to support Covid-19 response efforts, including integrating Covid-19 data into the Data Commons and contributing to the Covid Severity project.

Google hopes this program will create an interest to become lifelong contributors to open source.