October 15, 1999–With the return of the last student to the University of Tsukuba in Japan, the 1999 Student Intern Program came to an end last month. This year’s interns represented seven different countries: the U.S., Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Japan, and Russia. It included high school students as well as Ph.D. candidates. As in previous years, this summer’s interns worked on a variety of key projects within Wolfram Research. Their projects ranged from testing and development of standard packages to graphic design and marketing on the Mathematica for Students campaign to code documentation and debugging.

The 1999 Student Intern Program was very competitive, with almost nine hundred applicants for only 20 positions. Barb Taub, Director of Human Resources, spoke very highly of this year’s interns. “I would just like to stress how successful this program was. We had an unusually strong internship class this year and saw completion of many important projects. The most significant sign of this is the fact that 40 percent of our internship class received offers of continuing employment, either full- or part-time.” In the past three years alone, 22 interns have been retained either as staff or as returning interns. Said Taub, “This success continues a long tradition of bringing interns on as staff members.”

Planning is already under way for the summer 2000 intern program, which has an early-decision application deadline of November 1, 1999. The regular application deadline is February 1, 2000, though Wolfram Research does offer a limited number of internships on a year-round basis.

More information on the Student Intern Program and the application process is available.