[brandall10]

I've had 3 interns on my team since last summer. One is a bit older than a typical college student, I believe she's a 26 yo bioinformatics major.

I can only speak for myself, but I look for 1) definitely a student, so expectations of going perm don't hit us by surprise, 2) either not too far off from graduation or the ability to work part-time during school 3) interest in the work, has some tie-in w/ the direction they want for their career, and 4) open to the possibility of going full-time upon graduation.

I'd love to have someone making such a transition working w/ us, we actually might have a need coming up shortly. But then again, I'm 37, and we're in SoCal...

One word of caution - make sure the scope of work is locked down. A smaller company might see you as a cheap backup system admin resource since you have background in that (under the guise of "we wear many hats here"), but you really need on the job experience before going full-time in what you want to transition to.