MITRE – “Nothing but good things working at MITRE”

Pros

As a computer science intern coming in to MITRE with no experience, I didn't really know what to expect. Everything was extremely easy to get into and they put me right into a team of similar-minded people working towards a specific, manageable goal. The team's supervisor was very satisfied with progress and gave us constant feedback (and praise). I always felt completely appreciated for my work and knew what to work on. About 15-20 interns were working in the same room as me, with very few higher-up people (who mostly had shared offices), making it an extremely comfortable work environment. Hours worked were not very strict so long as I put in 40 a week and was there to meet with my team and update progress to managers. Successful work was rewarded with opportunities to keep working for MITRE after the internship was up or in successive summers.

I ended up developing a deliverable almost completely designed by my team which would actually benefit those who needed it. I wasn't put on tasks like debugging old Java code or anything like that. It was very freeform. We were given a task and basically said "Ok, now go do this".

Cons

Managers were not very technical people. This worked to my advantage when they saw large amounts of progress in things like a simple GUI change, but to my disadvantage when some didn't understand how much work a seemingly minor tweak might be. Similarly, other employees vary in skill sets, and you may be working on a programming project with a team only half consisting of programmers.

The red tape in getting access to things you don't have access to can be more than its worth. The computers are locked down and run Windows. The process to apply to mark a computer as unsecure and let you put Linux on it was lengthy and clearly not something they dealt with often. I had to file support tickets to make changes to a web server I didn't have admin access to, which often resulted in back and forths that could easily be resolved with 5 minutes time by the administrator.

Advice to Senior Management

I don't really have any. Interns are treated extremely well and most other people at the company seem to be very happy too.