Texas Instruments

TI is very supportive of co-ops and new hires. Every single recent grad in their rotational program had great things to say about their experiences, and most of my fellow co-ops really enjoyed their work and their supervisors. The facilities in Dallas were really nice. TI definitely has their stuff together and seems to have a knack for getting into the right markets.

During the summer I spent at TI, my team was in the middle of a very uninteresting phase of work. Applications teams get to do a lot of cool, hands-on stuff, but while I was there, they were preparing documentation, tweaking software tools, generating header files, etc.--extremely tedious, logistical tasks that could almost be done by a team of fairly knowledgeable high school students. Apparently I was just unlucky, because I met about 100 other co-ops who were doing interesting stuff.

Seems like a bad move to put co-ops or new grads on teams that are doing mind-numbing work; the real value of a co-op is not their work, but their potential as a future employee. Even though I got a chance to see that TI is a cool place, my experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

Make sure co-ops and LEAPers actually get to do engaging work.

Applications may be engaging for the experienced employees who know the products, and sometimes fun for everyone on the team, but it is the worst place to put a co-op when the work feels so tedious and mindless (piecing together old documentation to create new documentation, searching documentation for errors, generating header files, etc.).

Most of my time was spent learning the quirks of some convoluted process (that I might have been able to improve if I'd been around longer!), sorting through inconsistent documentation, or tracking down the right person to bother about some specific issue.

Having just graduated and feeling ready to tackle tough engineering problems, this co-op term left me disappointed and dreading future interviews where I'll be asked what I gained from my summer at TI.