Prestige or Job Role when choosing Internship
Hello Reddit,
I recently came into a dilemma when deciding which job offer to accept for my next internship. These are the following two options I have on my plate:
Background: Sophomore standing with prior experience in data operations from freshman year internship.
- Software Engineer Intern
- Small insurance company
- Working on creating middleware for various services
- Python, Java/Spring, AWS as primary tech stack
- Pays ~25/hr
- Database Engineer Intern
- Quant Firm (SIG)
- Working on maintaining database services (monitoring, developing, etc.)
- Mainly DevOps with some Data Eng elements
- Bash, Python, Prometheus, MongoDB, MariaDB as main tech stack
- Pays ~35/hr
My goal in the future is to become a software engineer (preferably backend). I would have another internship cycle to potentially land a SWE again next year. The main question is which one of these jobs will put me in a better position to be competitive for next year's internship cycle? While Job #2 isn't software engineering, there are aspects of it such as DevOps and Databases that could help me in the future. I'm not sure if prestige of working for at a Quant Firm for a job that isn't exactly what I want to do in the future is worth doing over an experience that has what I'm looking for in terms of work + tech stack, but does not have prestige.