CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- No one fetches coffee, and there's not a copier in sight.
The 24 college students participating in IBM's Extreme Blue summer program aren't your garden-variety interns, abandoned to a far-off cubicle and assigned a series of meaningless tasks that are forgotten by the time September rolls around.
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In the hotly competitive market for tech-savvy summer interns, IBM has crafted an alluring pitch. Come to Cambridge for the summer and work on high-profile programming projects "that will actually see the light of day," says Dave Grossman, one of the program's organizers.
And in a bid to compete with free-wheeling Internet startups (which often throw some stock options into an intern's pay package), IBM has created an atmosphere that "feels more like summer camp than work," according to Abbie Tittizer, a participant from the University of Texas at Austin.
The students, from a handful of the country's top engineering schools, such as Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell, are given free housing in an air-conditioned college dorm in downtown Boston. The rooms all have high-speed Ethernet ports, and each participant gets an IBM laptop for the summer. Subway passes are free.
In addition to eight-plus hours of work a day, there are weekly catered lunches with IBM executives and evening lectures delivered by some of the company's top researchers -- among them, John Heidenreich, leader of the team that developed the first microchips to use copper instead of aluminum for their circuitry. Pizza follows.
But what seems to hold the most appeal to participants -- who all work in the same cubicle farm, decorated with absurd whiteboard drawings, a football table, and a piñata hanging from the ceiling -- is the work.
"I didn't want to do a lame Java Bean," says Randy Fernando, a Cornell student who instead has devised a Java-based program that lets users write scripts to automatically extract data - a stock quote, for example - from a Web page. "I wanted to do something useful."
According to Extreme Blue's organizers, the chances are good that Fernando's Java Bean will at some point be used by IBM's Global Services Division. The same is true of the projects the other students are working on, like Web browsers for wireless devices and software for improved IP multicasting.
Next to Fernando is a cluster of six students who are creating a content-management system - which makes it easier to create, post, and update Web pages - that will be used for IBM's corporate site, as well as the mammoth site the company will build for the summer Olympics next year in Sydney. The work the team is doing is so strategically important to the company that as Angela Chen, a student from nearby MIT, launches into a slide presentation explaining its features, the team's mentor, Paul Reed, has to ask, "You know what's confidential, right, Angela?" She does.
If the most popular kids at summer camp are those who can do the fanciest dives into the lake, at Extreme Blue the attendees who garner the most respect are those who work the longest hours. In this case, it's the team writing a chat/instant-messaging client with a flexible user interface: It can be decorated, for example, with skins like an MP3 player, or upgraded with plug-ins that let a sports site stream scores into the chat window. For Thomas Brown, one of the students working on the chat program, it's a badge of honor to have worked over the July Fourth holiday, and to be a rare presence at the Extreme Blue dorm.
"We work hard, but we play hard, too," Angela Chen asserts, a bit defensively. She is, after all, sitting in front of a monitor on a perfect summer day, barely a block away from the breezy banks of the Charles River.
Throughout the eight-week program, there have been numerous scheduled - and impromptu - extracurricular activities. The former have included a whale watch, a Boston Pops picnic on the Fourth of July, a jaunt up to Salem, a Red Sox game, and road trips to IBM facilities in New York. In the latter category: midnight laser tag games in the office hallways.
The program wraps up Thursday, when the group will present its work to an audience of IBM executives, followed by an awards ceremony and farewell dinner. Students intimate that they've planned some surprises for their mentors (short-sheeting?), though they're stingy with specifics.
Beneath the playfulness of the Extreme Blue summer session, though, is a serious purpose. IBM's Advanced Internet Technologies group wants to prove that it can offer the same technical challenges and excitement as a start-up.
"We're under no illusions. It's a tough recruiting market, and we're trying to get top-notch people," says Sean Martin, a senior software engineer. Martin is dressed like a camp counselor, in khaki shorts, short-sleeve shirt, and sandals. He says most of the Extreme Blue participants are already better software developers than a typical first-year IBM hire.
"We certainly intend to recruit a lot of these people," he says. "This is a little like summer camp, but it's also a bit like a long-term job interview."
