About this Map

Background. A popular job board for tech roles for internships and recent graduates within North America is Simplify's annual internship list, maintained daily in collaboration with The University of Pittsburgh's student-run Pitt Computer Science Club. The first annual list began in May 2020 and as of February 2026 the repository reached 43,000 stars on GitHub.

Internships posts on the Simplify GitHub repository are listed within markdown tables that are organized by job category: software engineering, data science & machine learning, quantitative finance, hardware, or project management. Posts include the company name, job title, job location, how long ago the job was posted, and a link to apply. Simplify has separate markdown files for summer internships, off-season internships, archive & inactive internships, and new graduate roles.

Methodology. For this study, I downloaded and parsed Simplify's Summer 2026 internship list and their 2026 off-season (Fall 2025 through Spring 2026) internship list during February 2026, including both active and filled job posts. Internships that were remote positions or not in the US/Canada were filtered out. Internship posts that didn't specify a city location would count towards a state's total internship count but were not plotted on the map. Internship posts that specified multiple cities were counted as multiple internships. Additionally, companies that were hiring for multiple roles within the same city were also counted as multiple internships. Cities were converted to latitude and longitude coordinates with Simplemaps's World Cities Database, with smaller cities not present in the database being filtered out.

After filtering, there were nearly 12,000 tech internships for 2026 with complete information of city, location, season, and role. With this data I constructed an interactive map with D3 that can zoom in on regions and filter the data by role and season. GeoJSON files from Simplemaps were used as a base map for the states and provinces.

Study Limitations. A significant limitation of this study is that it counts the number of internship role postings and weighs them equally, rather than counting the number of internships that actually occurred. Some job posts will result in multiple interns hired for that role while other job postings will result in only one intern being hired.

Additional Information. Besides the geographical, seasonal, and role information presented in this report, Simplify's job board includes additional information regarding job posts. They indicate if an internship post requires US citizenship or if it does not provide sponsorship. The totals for each of those categories were 63 and 167, respectively (about 1.9% of roles in the study).

Simplify's job board also denoted some companies as "FAANG+", a term that refers to top-performing technology companies that are desirable to work at. While identifying top tech companies can be helpful to many, the categorization can be arbitrary and many great companies weren't assigned the label, so I chose to not report on this information.

For roles that are "off-season" (i.e. not in Summer 2026), Simplify included information on the specific quarter it takes place: Fall 2025, Winter 2026, or Spring 2026. For the purposes of this study I grouped all of the off-season roles together since they occur when college students are usually in school in the United States and Canada. Each individual season has less internships than the off-season total shown in this report.