Phil Gee, University Relations Manager for EA, was good enough to answer a few of my questions about the EA internship program — by far the largest (and probably oldest) program in the industry, excepting perhaps the console manufacturers. On to the interview:
How long has EA’s college internship program been active?
If my memory serves, almost 10 years to this day.
When the program first started, how many interns did you accept (and in roughly what proportion: engineers, artists, production, business, etc?) How many interns do you accept now?
I’ve only been here for 3.5 years, but from conversations with early alumni of the internship program, I can tell you it was rather small. We had roughly 20-30 interns during the summer, working predominantly at EA Redwood Shores. A little over half (let’s say 60%) worked in game development (art, engineering, production) and the other half were on the corporate side (marketing, finance, IT). Today, our program is a global one; we host approximately 274 interns (fiscal year 2006) with close to 70% of them being in game development.
