NITLE Student Summer Software Engineering Internship

The Software Engineering Program provides NITLE with a venue for exploring a number of related issues:

1. Ways to provide CS students in Liberal Arts colleges with meaningful applied experience
2. How we might integrate students into campus IT operations in ways that are both useful to the institution and meaningful as part of the students' education
3. How we might collaboratively develop and support software applications designed with the needs of liberal arts colleges in mind, given that many of our colleges have few or no software developers on staff

The program was designed based on input both from CS departments (faculty and students) and IT departments, and the curriculum was created and is taught by faculty from NITLE colleges. Like other NITLE ICCs (inter-institutional collaborative courses), it is taught be a team of faculty from different institutions, drawing on the particular expertise of each faculty member to create a course not possible at a single institution.

Each year, 10 students are selected via a competitive process to participate. These students receive are in residence for 9 weeks at NITLE South, where they receive instruction in software engineering from program faculty and together work on a project selected on the basis of usefulness to the consortium and participating colleges.

Students apply in the fall or early winter, and are selected by participating faculty by late February. Selected students receive campus housing at Southwestern University (site of the NITLE), a limited meal plan and a stipend for the summer.

For example, students in the pilot program created the ACSTC Course Delivery System (used to deliver inter-campus courses), and ELATED, an easy to use front end for Fedora that makes the functionality of Fedora available to small colleges.

We welcome ideas for projects from participating institutions