Summer 2014 - Study-vacation In A Usa College Town.

What do international graduate students in the USA do over the Winter break?

Most international students, particularly during the mid-year break in December to early January take the opportunity to travel the US to see the places they've always heard about but never seen, e.g. New Year's Eve in Times Square (NYC). Because the campuses they attend will be very quiet during these periods, getting outside that town, city, state, is a great way to recharge their batteries for the next semester and see the great diversity of cultures, landscapes, cities, and people the US has to offer.

What did you do in the summers during undergrad?

I did a programming internship every summer. This was a great deal for me: it was fun, I learned a lot, made some useful connections and got paid. In tech, at least, unpaid internships are not the norm and you should generally avoid them. Most tech internships both give you a great experience and pay well.I ended up interning at very different companies:Guidewire Software was a mid-sized (~600 person) enterprise software company. It gave me a good feel for what a larger company is like, although it was probably a bit skewed, in a good way—Guidewire consistently places near the top of "best places to work" lists.Ashima Arts was a tiny seed-stage startup writing tools for WebGL in OCaml. Seriously tiny: one other person. (We were a spinoff from a slightly larger research firm.) That got me practical OCaml experience, which is pretty rare. Incidentally, it also got me over my fear of advanced math. The guy I was working with would casually learn about areas of math that interested him, and I realized that it could be perfectly accessible even without having taken any "real" math classes.Jane Street was a quantitative trading firm in New York. Coming in, I didn't know much about finance, so I learned a lot. And hey, more OCaml experience! It's a bit smaller than Guidewire but better known because of its aggressive recruiting. It looks pretty good on a resume :).Also, living in New York for the summer was incredible. New York is now at the top of my list of places to move, mostly pushing aside the cities in Europe I was considering before that. The Bay Area is awesome, but I'm not going to live here forever...The main alternative to internships for me would have been doing research over the summer which is also a great choice. Since I started research Junior year, it was only really an option for my last summer. I applied to Jane Street on a lark and that offer was more compelling than doing research, in part because I had been productive enough during the year.On the whole, all these experiences were great. I would heartily recommend anyone interested in tech to pursue internships over the summer, starting as soon as possible. I learned more, both in CS and other topics, from my internships and research than I did from my classes.