Home

Contents

• Success pathways
  • Full time
  • Internships
• Action items
• Appendix
  • Methodology
  • More tips

Getting your first CS internship as a community college student

Published 2026-10-12

Tags: #education

If you are a CS Washington community college student, this post is for you. We will look at recent graduates (2023-2026) from other 4-year community college programs who found internships and jobs and answer (1) Success stories: how have recent graduates found jobs? and (2) Action items: what can you do to follow them?

Success pathways

Here are some real success paths of students who graduated in 2023-2026 from Bellevue and Green River colleges.

1. Recruiting events. Costco IT open house -> internship -> return internship -> full time (at least 3 students landed the internship)
2. Domain expertise. Internship leveraging previous domain expertise. E.g. a student with a prior supply chain degree ended up interning at Weyerhaeuser.
3. Capstone. One student’s capstone matched the domain of the company where they later interned and got an offer. Here is their path: Capstone building an IVF embryo-grading web app -> internship at Northwest Clinical Research Center -> full time offer.

And for completeness, here’s a more complete list of where the recent batch landed:

Full time

JPMorganChase, Costco IT, Northwest Clinical Research Center, Boeing, ISenseCloud

Internships

• Local employers: Costco IT, Weyerhaeuser, GE Vernova, PACCAR Parts, BNSF Railway, Fred Hutch
• Big tech / research labs: Spotify, 99P Labs (Honda Research Institute USA)
• Smaller companies: PGT Trucking, Vantage Radiology, CRE8 Labs, FPT Software, Amentum, Stemtac Foundation (nonprofit)
• On campus: Community college’s in-house web development team

Action items

Based on these paths, I would recommend these two action items.

Go to in-person events. Costco IT open house is a great one. Skip classes if they conflict (but let your professors know). IRL impressions beat cold applications any day. Make use of your locality so you have an advantage over online-only applicants.

Capstone. Take capstone courses before you graduate. You get to tackle graduation requirements and have something noteworthy to display on your resume.

• Open source contribution through CodeDay, with MinT as mentors. See Green River’s study of this program here.
• Real clients. Finding real clients will require more agency on your part (does your college IT dept have internship opportunities? Know of any local businesses who want a website?). You can also ask your college to set up a Riipen account. Here is an example collaboration with Bellevue College that worked out well.
• See other example capstone projects from Bellevue College here.

Okay, no more reading. Alt-tab to your Google Calendar, and set a calendar reminder to ask your department advisor (1) When is the next capstone offering? (2) What are the upcoming in-person recruiting events?

Start now.

Appendix

Methodology

Here is how I got the data to back up the claims above:

• Recent alumni highlights. Green River blog posts: https://greenriverdevs.medium.com/
• LinkedIn post. Look at recent capstone / graduation posts on LinkedIn (example).
• LinkedIn search. Search “green river junior computer science mint” in the people tab. The “mint” filter is important.

More tips

If you want more tips on how to up-level yourself, see this post.

Comment via: medium, substack, linkedin

This site is open source. Improve this page.