[moftz]

Internships and rigorous senior projects can help prepare students for real jobs. Having senior projects where you need to spend time documenting your work, scheduling tasks, etc can greatly help students get ready for when they start working at places where this is required from a management standpoint. My senior design project involved scheduling our project milestones, weekly meetings with the professor, daily meetings among group members, documenting the features, and even putting in purchase requests and justifications for hardware. That project plus my internships (once as a help desk tech, once in an intern group project, once working on a contract, and once working on an internal project) made me feel pretty confident to start my actual job and jump into the whole process again.