What do Computing Interns Discuss Online? An Empirical Analysis of Reddit Posts

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit posts to understand computing interns' discussions and sentiments, revealing generally positive feelings and common themes related to academics, careers, and social activities.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of online discussions among computing interns, uncovering prevalent themes and sentiment patterns.

Findings

Interns generally express positive sentiments.

Discussions focus on academics, careers, and social activities.

Large dataset of 143,912 posts analyzed.

Abstract

Computing internships are the most common way for students to gain practical real-world experience. Internships have become a major part of most computing curricula because they help match student abilities or expectations with the demand of the workforce. The internship experience for students vary due to diverse factors such misconceptions about industrial realities, level of preparation, networking opportunities and so on. This papers attempts to provide insights into students discussions and opinions related to internship. We extracted 143,912 online Reddit posts related to computing internships out of 921,845 posts containing the rootword "intern", and then used topic modelling to unravel the common themes in the discussions. Next, we applied sentiment analysis techniques to understand the feelings expressed by the students in the Reddit posts. The results show that computing interns generally express a positive sentiment and the discussions were mostly related to academics, school admissions, professional career, entertainment activities, and social interactions.