What I liked
State Farm puts a TON of time, effort and resources into your summer internship experience. I can't recommend it enough.
-From day one, they worked hard to make sure we felt welcome, even though this was difficult in a virtual environment.
-The company culture is friendly, respectful and professional. Everyone is kind and polite. Almost every employee I met (associates to directors) welcomed me to the company, asked about how the internship was going, and made themselves available for any questions/ requestis for advice.
-They pair you with a mentor from your department for the duration of your internship. The mentor will guide you with helpful feedback and advice throughout the internship, so you never feel like you can't ask for help or direction. They'll give you pointers on how to improve your work, and help you prepare for your job hunt after graduation, whether you decide you want to stay at State Farm or not.
-You're also paired with an intern coordinator who will do bi-weekly 1x1 meetings with you throughout the internship, answering any questions you have and making sure you get as much as possible out of your internship and make yourself a better candidate for a full-time offer, if that's your goal.
-I can only speak for my department's interns here, but the pay is extremely competitive.
-There are weekly game nights after work, so you get to know the other State Farm interns and make friends.
-The State Farm office in Richardson, known as CityLine, is awesome. It's sort of like its own little city. Check it out on Google Street View if you've never been. Definitely a cool place to work.
-You're not stuck working on the same thing all the time. If you find an area of work that interests you at State Farm, you might be able to move departments or at least start getting your feet wet with that work. You're not stuck in a silo.
-I kind of touched on this in my last paragraph, but I thought I might elaborate: there are a ton of different careers at State Farm. Talk to anyone who's been here a long time, and they'll tell you about how they've worked in five, six, seven different departments doing all sorts of interesting work. Especially on the software/IT side of things, but also in other departments.
-Finally, there's Hack Day, an internal hackathon that teams of interns participate in each summer. You get together with other interns to create some sort of product/prototype/solution that solves a problem for State Farm, and the top couple of teams have the chance to have their hack actually built and implemented by State Farm. Oh, and there are some SERIOUS $$$ prizes for the winners.
