Ford

• Competitive pay and housing stipend.

• Many of the people I worked with were very down to earth. Many of the union workers, in particular, were pleasant and often quite funny.

• Despite my harsh criticism below, I really feel that many of the people were doing the best they could with the limited resources they were given and the demands they were facing.

Ford is a company that wants smart people to solve tough problems.

Fair enough, but most of the problems I saw stemmed from poor communication, poor planning, being understaffed, working with obsolete and/or neglected equipment and systems, ignoring problems for years until they could no longer be ignored, an overworked workforce, and a culture of sweeping problems under the rug or shipping them downstream so they became somebody else's problem.

Very few of the problems I saw were of a technical nature. So, as an engineering student, I felt out of place and like the skills I've been working on for the past several years were largely irrelevant to this position.

You won't know where you'll be working or what you'll be doing until about 8 weeks before your internship starts.

Little contact time with actual engineers.

Very little contact time with my boss.

The facility was run-down, always smelled like something was burning, there was a smoky haze in the air and puddles of water around charged equipment.

If you intern outside of Michigan you'll miss out on a lot - from day-long intern events to important details and communications.

Ford automatically enrolls you in their 401k plan and subtracts $ from your paycheck after a few pay periods. As a poor college student, that's not ideal. I pre-emptively contacted the 401k department and was assured I was opted out, only to have the deductions happen anyway.

I was given a large project that was very frustrating. Management seemed to think it was a great project for an intern. Meanwhile, people more intimately familiar with the facility and its systems told me I'd basically been handed a shovel and told to move a mountain.

If you have worked for a company that does well at Lean Manufacturing, you will have a lot of head-scratching moments at Ford, and will often be bewildered as to why they do things the way they do.

Lack of professionalism. I witnessed several heated arguments, some with slammed doors and profanity. None of this was directed at me, thankfully.

Ford wants you to be very qualified for their internships - high GPA, previous internship(s), extracurriculars, etc. If you are highly qualified, you will probably languish here. You can do so much better. I recommend you keep looking and don't settle for Ford.