building experience early

Most of the big-name programs built for freshmen and sophomores closed between 2025 and 2026. Two are still running. This page covers what remains, plus the campus-side and self-directed work that fills the gap the rest of them left behind.

An empty resume is a normal place to start. It becomes a problem when you wait for someone else to fill it.

if you’re coming straight from high school

The adjustment that matters most isn’t the coursework. It’s that nobody checks whether you did the extra credit anymore. In high school, staying on track was mostly automatic = a counselor, a syllabus, a parent reminding you about a deadline. In college, none of that exists by default. The students who fall behind in the recruiting race are usually doing fine academically. They’re the ones waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

Freshman and sophomore year is where that gap opens or closes. You have more runway now than you will ever have again, so everything below is a way to spend it on purpose.

the programs that still exist

For years the standard advice was to chase a dedicated first-year program = Google STEP, Meta University, Microsoft Explore, Amazon Propel. Most were built specifically for students from backgrounds underrepresented in tech. When large tech companies scaled back their diversity programs starting in 2025, several were folded into the general internship pipeline or shut down.

Here’s where each one stands as of August 2026.

program	status	what to know
NVIDIA Ignite	running	12-week paid pre-internship, open to current freshmen and sophomores
Microsoft Explore	running	separate first-year and second-year applications. 12 weeks, Redmond and Atlanta
Google STEP	contested	widely reported as merged into the general SWE internship. confirm before planning around it
Meta University	likely gone	Meta’s own program page returns a 404
Amazon Propel	unclear	no current listing on Amazon’s own careers site

Two live programs is a thin list. Apply to both if you qualify, and apply to the general internship pipelines too, since that’s where the merged programs went. Then put the rest of your effort into the two sections below, where you make your own seat instead of competing for one.

note on Atlanta Microsoft Explore runs out of Atlanta as well as Redmond. That makes it the rare early program you can do without relocating. See Local ATL resources for the rest of the local scene.

Program status changes fast, and this table will age. Confirm on the company’s own careers page before you build a plan around any of these. A program that ran last year may not run this year.

campus-side, research and TA roles

The programs above have a few hundred seats nationally. Your own department has openings every semester, and almost nobody asks for them.

Undergrad research is the highest-leverage thing available to you right now. Professors run labs, labs need hands, and most students never ask, so you’re competing against a handful of people instead of forty thousand. One semester gives you something specific to talk about in an interview, a reference who has actually seen you work, and the exact credential that AI/ML and research tracks weight most. See Picking your endgame for which tracks care.

How to actually ask:

Find three professors whose work you can describe in one sentence. Read their department page and one recent paper, or at least its abstract.
Email each one separately. Say what you read, what caught your attention, and that you want to help. Two short paragraphs.
State what you bring = hours per week, courses finished, languages you know.
Follow up once after a week. Then move to the next three.

Most won’t reply. That’s the normal outcome, and each attempt costs you one email (which is why the volume here matters more than the polish).

TA, LA, and tutoring roles open every semester and usually go to whoever asks first. You get paid, you stay close to faculty, and explaining data structures to twenty people a week teaches you more than another pass through the textbook. Ask the professor who taught the course you did well in. At most schools that’s the entire process.

Both of these compound. The professor who supervises your research is the same person who writes your recommendation and forwards your name when a lab down the hall needs someone. See Getting referrals that actually work for what to do with that.

self-directed, projects, open source, hackathons

This is the part nobody can gatekeep. It’s also prerequisite number one in Landing your first internship, so this section stays short.

one finished project. Finished beats impressive. A small tool that works and has a readme beats an ambitious repo with three commits and no entry point. This is the thing that survives a follow-up question in an interview.
open source. Start with documentation or a small bug in a project you already use. Your first merged pull request proves you can work inside someone else’s codebase, and that’s worth more than the code itself.
hackathons. The fastest way to get a project and a network in the same weekend. The internship playbook covers why they work.

These need no application and no permission. That’s the entire point of putting them here.

where to go next

Freshman year and Sophomore year, for what your stage should look like semester by semester
Landing your first internship, for the search mechanics once you have something to show
Picking your endgame, if you still need a direction to point all of this at
Local ATL resources, for the Atlanta scene and the people already doing this nearby

turn this into action

Send three emails this week. One to a professor whose research you read. One to the professor of the class you did best in, asking about a TA or LA spot. One to yourself, naming the project you will finish and the date you will finish it by.

If NVIDIA Ignite or Microsoft Explore are open when you read this, apply to both before you close the tab. They take an afternoon, and they’re the only two dedicated programs left.