AT&T Park’s career fair draws students
Speakers, games and career fair among activities at AT&T Park
Virtual reality demos and pingpong tables. A star-studded speaker series. A career fair with more than 40 companies. Swag. It was more than enough to attract 5,000 tech interns from more than 100 companies to AT&T Park one evening last week.
Internapalooza brings together highly paid interns each year for what is called a “night of networking and learning from top CEOs and entrepreneurs.”
The event, free to attend and heavily sponsored, is just one more way that Bay Areas interns fare better than most. In other industries, “intern” suggests a college student learning the ropes, often for little money. Nationally, according to Glassdoor, the average intern pay translates to a $33,120 annual salary (though internships often last for less time). But tech companies like Snap, Twitter and Pinterest, which compete fiercely for fresh talent, pay as much as three times that, according to Rodney Folz, a Berkeley student who conducted an informal survey of intern salaries, and Glassdoor, which collects anonymously reported salary figures.
Dressed in everything from companybranded T-shirts and backpacks to business casual, the interns packed the stands clutching nachos and pretzels purchased at the stadium’s Doggie Diner. Speakers included Dropbox CEO Drew Houston (whose company offers $8,632 a month to interns, according to Glassdoor), Tinder Chief Technology Officer Maria Zhang ($5,800 a month) and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng ($7,606 a month). The speakers advised the attending Millennials to see their youth as an advantage and seek out mentors.
“They’re the future leaders of the technology industry,” said Internapalooza founder Cory Levy. “And to bring them all together, we’re hoping they’ll meet someone they’ll work with one day or a company they’ll work with one day.”
At 25, Levy is a classic tech industry prodigy. In high school he had internships at a startup, an incubator and venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. He was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 this year for his company After School, maker of a social networking app for teenagers that has raised more than $16 million in venture capital.
Levy started Internapalooza, formerly called the NextGen Conference, in 2009, while he was in high school. Attendance at the event has grown from 100 people in its initial years to 5,000 today.
Interns said they had a range of motivations for coming, from career development to meeting peers.
“It was a really good event last year,” said Raymond Ferrell, who was attending his second Internapalooza. “I got a lot of interviews, but turned them down to start my own software consulting company.”
Free stuff from the companies was a perk for Salesforce intern Mindy Luong,
who heard about the event on social media. “We really want to check out the booths,” she said. Big names like Google and Amazon had tables set up, along with smaller companies hoping to connect with young talent.
Axon, a startup that builds body cameras for police officers, attended for the first time. “It’s a great opportunity to meet a lot of people in a short time,” said senior recruiter Scott Simmons. This year’s Internapalooza attendees had an average GPA of 3.68, and more than half were computer science majors.
The event has become so popular that Brian Wan, a UC Santa Cruz student, was unable to get in last year. “This year, I registered a couple months early,” he said.
“When we first started, it was just, we kind of looked at the calendar and said let’s plan one in a couple weeks,” said Levy. “After we started to get some of the bigger companies involved, they asked ‘Hey can you give us a three-, four-, five-month heads-up?’ ”
This year, the event is expanding beyond the Bay Area. The first New York City Internapalooza will take place July 23.