IBM

The environment is much more casual than I expected. Almost nobody wears ties outside of the Corporate Headquarters. Even then, I only saw a few.

They trust you with a Thinkpad (or Mac) from day one, and after first-time setup, you can work from almost anywhere (although in-office is preferred). The keyboards on the Thinkpads are phenomenal.

The company as a whole is moving towards more Agile methodologies. I wasn't stuck in a cubicle, and my team all sat together.

Everyone is reachable by Slack or Sametime. Many executives are willing to talk with you if they have the time.

Lots of opportunities to learn. Think40 has plenty of free learning modules available, and workshops for different technologies are held.

If you work well and communicate with your managers, you can discuss continued-employment internships. Not guaranteed, but I know several of my coworkers negotiated this successfully.

All of my coworkers were fantastic.

With my batch of interns, there was a bit of a mix-up with people's titles and job responsibilities. I got the better end of the stick (hired as Tech Support, worked as a developer for Corporate Applications), but some of the people studying engineering in some capacity (Computer Science, Information Systems, IT Management) were doing more HR-related work, like making PowerPoint presentations for other offices' Workday transition.

Some of the intern-focused events were a bit too spread out, things like Design Thinking workshops, Agile group training, etc. Part of this was because of differing start dates, but I would have preferred these events to have been closer together.

Some managers are better than others.

Some of the technologies used are outdated or on the way out. I doubt they'll replace Lotus Notes anytime soon, and Sametime Connect is being slowly phased out for Slack.

Documentation on stuff like LotusScript and the equivalent operations in Serverside Javascript is very barebones, due to its internal nature.

Be more consistent with and better communicate work duties and job roles.

Concentrate new-hire activities into waves.