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At this point, get whatever experience you can to determine what you would like, and frankly, the contacts you make will be as helpful as the experience. It's an internship, you have time, and at a small enough future employer, you may have to cover multiple roles. Yes, software pays more now, and data science (let alone data engineering) is still maturing and figuring itself out, especially at junior levels. Your current background will help with data science, but doing software for an internship won't hurt you in the future if you want to do data science. Having a programming background helps with data work, some of which is programming directly and indirectly to talk to data engineers/software engineers, and vice versa, a math and data background is super helpful in attacking software problems in many areas. If you feel like picking the wrong thing now at a young age will scar you forever, you're doing it wrong. In this whole industry, things change constantly, and you will have to reinvent yourself and learn with it. If you don't like it, you can always switch specialties, or even generalize a little more broadly. Reference: I've been in IT for the better part of 20 years, much of that as a web development generalist, and now I'm doing data engineering. ~75% of the skills overlap. |