Students have the chance to express their preferences for projects as part of our matching process. Here's how that works:

For the advanced track: These students are close to being ready to graduate and pursue an entry-level position. To get into the track, students must show:

For the intermediate track: Similar to the advanced track, but with relaxed requirements for the complexity of projects they've built outside of class and debugging skills.

(For industry mentors: don't worry about whether your project is better suited for the intermediate or advanced track. We'll assign it to a track based primarily on the amount of resources available for students to solve their own problems online.)

Teams will be introduced the Friday before the bootcamp week starts. No team meetings will start until a week later, after bootcamp week is complete and everyone has some experience in their tech stack.

There's no pre-CodeDay Labs work required!

Students in the advanced track have more experience building projects outside of classwork, and more technical knowledge. We expect these students to be better able to have a conversation about the relative benefits of technical choices and to debug their own problems without guidance. These students tend to be close to graduation (although they don't need to be).

Students in the intermediate track require more guidance when making technical or architecture choices, and need more help with debugging new problems. They tend to be college sophomores or juniors.

Both tracks have the same mentors, however we assign projects with a more clear-cut structure, and more online resources, to the intermediate track.

Generally no, this program is an opportunity for students without a paid internship to gain experience working on a project with industry volunteers like yourselves.

There are a few students who receive some sort of payment through a third-party:

We'll let you know if either of these apply to your students. Regardless of funding, all students do commit to treating this like a normal internship.

If any issue arises during the program that a mentor feels they cannot handle, they can ask for help from our dedicated Mentor and Program Managers throughout the program. Examples of issues may include a non-responsive student, conflict with students or technical problems. More info on protocols will be included in the Mentor Training.

No, we encourage projects that aren't specifically CS-related! In past years, mentors have had teams working on hardware projects and a variety of data science-related projects. We will work with you to ensure there are students interested in your projects. In some cases, CodeDay can support the hardware purchases.

A team comprises three students who have committed between 20-40 hours a week for 5 weeks. (Not including one bootcamp week where we'll get them familiar with their new tech stack.)

So in total, most projects should include enough work for between 300-600 hours of intern-level work. (Not sure how much an intern can do? Plan for, in the worst case, about 50% of the output of a junior-level engineer, although many of our students will exceed this.)

One strategy many mentors use when planning their project is to come up with a base deliverable, and have a number of possible "stretch goals" in mind.

No, unlike at our CodeDay and Virtual CodeDay events, students do not propose projects at CodeDay Labs. (When we've tried this in past years, we've found that students don't know enough about industry technologies to come up with a project that challenges them.)

For the intermediate and advanced tracks: No, our mentors are industry professionals who want to pay forward their experiences and help current CS students get a taste of some of the real-world challenges faced by professionals in the technology industry.

Our team works with mentors to create a detailed project proposal. (You don't need to have a detailed project proposal when you submit.)

We hope to have all project proposals finalized in early June. We will work with you to ensure you have a proposal ready by the needed date.

Except in special cases which are cleared with a team's mentor, your entire team will be within 3 hours of each other. So for example, your team might have a member in California and New York, but it would not also have a member in Shanghai.

CodeDay Labs is designed to be an online experience, and it's unlikely you'll be geographically close to your entire team.

In the case that you are close to team members, you're welcome to meet them if you'd like, after consulting public health and safety protocols.