Can't agree enough. For me, internships were largely about being able to say "Okay, now I know I don't want to do that." Places I interned:
* Quigo (acquired by AOL) twice, before and after freshman year
* AMD, after sophomore year
* Goldman Sachs (as a developer), after junior year
* Microsoft, between the two years of my MS
* NASA, while doing my MS
I'm not trying to name drop, but to point out that I optimized for diversity and to emphasize how valuable this was. I worked for a startup (at two different sizes), an EE company, a bank, a big software company, and as an researcher at a government agency. Ultimately this helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school (work on my startup, then go to Google). I could easily have ended up doing something miserable (like going to Goldman - which would be miserable for me, at least) if I hadn't sampled so widely.
* Quigo (acquired by AOL) twice, before and after freshman year
* AMD, after sophomore year
* Goldman Sachs (as a developer), after junior year
* Microsoft, between the two years of my MS
* NASA, while doing my MS
I'm not trying to name drop, but to point out that I optimized for diversity and to emphasize how valuable this was. I worked for a startup (at two different sizes), an EE company, a bank, a big software company, and as an researcher at a government agency. Ultimately this helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school (work on my startup, then go to Google). I could easily have ended up doing something miserable (like going to Goldman - which would be miserable for me, at least) if I hadn't sampled so widely.