We launched One Day, One Internship less than 2 weeks ago, and we’re already stuck with an extra post because of Leap Day. Ok, it’s not really an extra post, since we write every day regardless of the date. Still, it’s a little disappointing that every 4th year the man manages to squeeze an extra day of productivity out of us – whether it be at school or work. We’ve never checked, but we wonder whether school’s give students an extra day off sometime during a Leap Year. Anybody have answers? Leave them in the comments. We wish Leap Day was a worldwide day off that would allow everyone to find time to do those things that you never get around to doing. Instead, it’s just another day, unless, of course, you’re a college student with no Friday classes. Staying with the theme of Leap Day, we’re going to take a look at LeapFrog and their internships.
At first glance LeapFrog looks like a toy manufacturer; however, they consider themselves “a leading designer, developer and marketer of innovative, technology-based educational products and related proprietary content.” You might be most familiar (especially if you are around children often) with their Leapster and LeapPad products. The former is a educational tool disguised as a handheld gaming system, while the latter is an interactive reading and writing system that is built into a book. We’ve never had the pleasure of using any of LeapFrog’s products, but judging by the fact that Leapster has sold over 4 million units (as of May 2007 according to Wikipedia), kids must enjoy them.
LeapFrog is a publicly traded company, which makes them a lot easier to research. A great job or internship search tip is to use a company’s Investor Relations page to dig for dirt. A company’s health is extremely important in your decision about whether or not to intern for them. Since your time with the company probably won’t amount to more than 3 months, a company’s long-term outlook may not seem all that important, but it can affect the way you’re treated and what types of opportunities the internship presents. A company that is struggling – like LeapFrog – isn’t always a bad thing for an intern, but make sure you do your research and ask the right questions if you get an interview.
LeapFrog only has one internship right now, and it’s as a Software Engineer in their Emeryville, CA office. Although it appears that this internship is focused on web development, you might want to look into whether there will be an opportunity to interact with the developers who work on the educational games for the Leapster product. LeapFrog has an RSS feed of new job openings, which we love, so stay tuned to see if they post any new internships.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
You guessed it! We also wrote about LeapFrog’s entry-level jobs at One Day, One Job.
Do I Know Anyone at LeapFrog? - Check LinkedIn | Check Facebook
Tags: education, Internships, software development, toys
This site is very helpful for me, i’m actually doing research for my Effective Speech class where we find info on a company we’d like to intern at and then do a mock “selling ourselves” to them for 8 minutes.
And no, we don’t get off an extra day for leap year or day, whatever you want to call it.