15 Tech Internships for Undergraduates in Illinois
- Stephen Turban
- Mar 16
- 11 min read
If you want to work in tech after graduation, getting experience early can make a big difference. An undergraduate internship allows you to work inside a professional tech team and develop relevant skills. A tech internship lets you observe how meetings turn into task lists, how those tasks become code, and how testing and feedback shape the outcome. You also learn how data is interpreted.
What tech internships are available for undergraduates in Illinois?
Illinois offers a variety of tech internships for undergraduates because of its cities, research universities, and companies. You can find internships in software, data science, cybersecurity, IT support, UX/UI work, cloud computing, and more. Many give you access to mentorship and projects that you can add to your professional portfolio. You’ll gain solid experience to strengthen your resume and figure out what aspects of tech you enjoy most.
With that, below are 15 tech internships for undergraduates in Illinois!
If you're looking for more prestigious internships, check out this set of blogs.
Location: Remote! You can work from anywhere in the world.
Cost: Varies depending on program type. Full financial aid available.
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Highly selective; 70 students.
Dates: Multiple cohorts throughout the year, including Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.
Application Deadline: Deadlines vary depending on the cohort. Spring (January), Summer (May), Fall (September), and Winter (November).
Eligibility: Undergraduate and gap year students are eligible to apply
The Ladder University Internship Program is a selective program that connects undergraduate students with high-growth startups, which raise over a million dollars on average. These organizations operate in diverse industries, including tech / deep tech. During the internship, you can explore your interests in tech, develop relevant skills, and gain work experience while working on real projects under the guidance of the startup manager. This internship also provides you with exposure to professional work environments and the opportunity to explore various career paths. At the end of the program, you will complete and present your work to the organization. Apply now!
Location: Synchrony Emerging Technology Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
Stipend: Check here for updates
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: The internship runs in the summer
Application Deadline: Rolling deadlines
Eligibility: Undergraduates enrolled as full-time students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are 18 years or older and have a minimum overall 3.0 GPA or higher
University of Illinois Research Park Emerging Technology Intern (Synchrony Emerging Technology Center) puts you inside a real corporate innovation setup on the UIUC campus, where teams are trying to test ideas fast and ship something useful for business stakeholders. Your work will involve market and tech research, data analysis, building small proof of concepts, data visualization, and light software engineering, depending on the project. You also get exposure to how agile teams actually run, meaning planning, updates, documentation, and working with people who do not speak in code. This role is best for students who like both business thinking and tech execution, and want to learn how companies turn messy problems into structured deliverables.
Location: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, or Northwestern University, IL
Stipend: $7,000
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Highly selective; 17-27 students
Dates: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: May 26 – July 31 | University of Chicago: June 8 – August 14 | Northwestern University: June 21 – August 29
Application Deadline: February 10
Eligibility: Undergraduates who have completed their freshman year by June with at least 4 undergraduate college courses of some combination of physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, and/or computer science
The Chicago Quantum Exchange Open Quantum Initiative (OQI) Undergraduate Fellowship is a research-heavy summer program where you work with real quantum labs and research groups across partner universities. You will spend the summer building literacy in quantum information science and engineering, while also doing work that can be experimental, computational, or theoretical. The program does a good job of showing you that quantum is not one job. It is hardware, algorithms, optics, materials, control systems, and a lot of math. You also get exposure to industry through a site visit, and you finish by presenting at the OQI symposium, which forces you to explain complex work in a clear, non-mystical way.
Location: Synchrony Emerging Technology Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
Stipend: Check here for updates
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: Runs in the summer
Application Deadline: Rolling deadlines
Eligibility: Undergraduates enrolled as full-time students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are 18 years or older and have a minimum overall 3.0 GPA or higher
University of Illinois Research Park Technology, Engineering, Design Intern (Synchrony Emerging Technology Center) is the more technical sibling of the Emerging Technology Intern role. You will work on applied projects where the output is usually something buildable, like a small system, a prototype, an API workflow, a data pipeline, or a proof of concept. Because the Innovation Station touches multiple areas, you might end up near AI and machine learning, DevOps, mobile development, cybersecurity, UX, or data engineering, depending on what the business side needs.
Location: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
Stipend: $6,000
Acceptance rate: 10%
Dates: Late May – early August
Application Deadline: February 18
Eligibility: Undergraduates majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) disciplines with an average GPA of 3.0/4.0 or higher
The Center for Power Optimization of Electro Thermal Systems Summer Research Internship Program is a classic engineering REU where you spend the summer solving problems that sit at the intersection of power, heat, and electrified mobility. That can mean materials and fabrication work, thermal management, electrical design, controls, or optimization, depending on the project. The day-to-day is research, so you are reading papers, learning lab or modeling workflows, and building results that can survive a research meeting. It is also one of those programs that quietly pushes you toward graduate school, because you spend a lot of time around PhD students, research culture, and the way engineering research is presented and defended.
Location: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL.
Stipend: $7,000
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: May 26 – August 1
Application Deadline: February 16
Eligibility: Undergraduates enrolled in a degree program (part-time or full-time) in engineering, computer science, crop/plant science, biology, animal science, agricultural sciences, technology management, or other related majors are eligible to apply
UIUC Center for Digital Agriculture REU (CDA REU) is a paid research program where agriculture is treated like a modern data and engineering problem. You will work on applied research projects that mix computing with systems, like sensors, farm data, crop modeling, robotics, AI tools, or decision support systems. What makes this REU different is that it is not just lab work. You also get site visits, a short course, and a hackathon focused on AI for agriculture, so you see how research ideas move toward usable tools.
Location: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
Stipend: $7,000
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Highly selective; 26 students
Dates: May 18 – July 31
Application Deadline: December 16 – February 2
Eligibility: Current undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The NASA Illinois Space Grant Consortium Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UIUC) is a structured summer research experience where you work full-time with a faculty team on NASA-related projects. Your research can be in aerospace, materials, robotics, data science, or engineering systems, depending on the lab. The program also builds the professional layer that most students miss, like research ethics, technical writing, and presenting work in a way that looks like real science communication. You finish with a symposium presentation.
Location: Electric Power Engineers, Inc., Champaign, IL
Stipend: Check here for updates
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: Check here for updates
Application Deadline: Rolling
Eligibility: Undergraduates with a major in Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering Technology from an accredited college or university with a minimum GPA of 3.0 or higher
University of Illinois Research Park Power Systems Engineer Intern (Electric Power Engineers, Inc.) is a practical industry internship for electrical engineering students who want to work on real grid and power system problems. You will support projects like steady state and short circuit studies, and you may also work on process improvements, such as writing Python scripts that help engineers move faster or reduce errors. This is not a lab research experience. It is closer to professional engineering work, where accuracy, documentation, and repeatable methods matter.
Location: Various locations in Illinois
Stipend: $2,800 per month
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: Varies depending on the agency
Application Deadline: March 6
Eligibility: Current college juniors, seniors, and graduate students who are Illinois residents
The Michael Curry Summer Internship Program Tech Track (Office of Governor JB Pritzker) is a government internship where the tech work is tied to public systems and service delivery. If you get a placement in the Department of Innovation and Technology, you may work on process mapping, service improvement, documentation, and operational workflows that affect how agencies function. It is a good fit if you are interested in tech management, information systems, or industrial engineering, and you want to see how technology decisions look inside large public institutions.
Location: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Urbana, IL
Stipend: $3,000
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Highly selective; 5 students
Dates: The program runs in the summer
Application Deadline: March 1
Eligibility: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign undergraduate students are eligible to apply
The Beckman Institute offers summer research opportunities for undergraduate students, with applicants expected to engage full-time in research over the summer term. Through the Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellows Program, you can conduct interdisciplinary research, including in tech. You are required to submit a final research report at the end of the summer and participate in a fall poster session, with additional support provided for donor acknowledgment.
Location: Chicago, IL
Stipend: Check here for updates
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: Check here for updates
Application Deadline: Rolling
Eligibility: Undergraduate students with completed coursework on the basics of quantum mechanics, a familiarity with quantum information science, and solid programming experience in Matlab/Python or similar
The Chicago Quantum Exchange Quantum Machines Internship Program is for students who already have some quantum mechanics background and can code well enough to work with real systems. Quantum Machines builds control platforms used in quantum computing research, so the work is close to hardware control, experimental workflows, data analysis, and system design. You are not just reading about quantum computing. You are working in an environment where experiments need to run cleanly and where control errors ruin results.
Location: National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
Stipend: $700 per week
Acceptance rate/cohort size: Highly selective; 10 students
Dates: May 27 – July 31
Application Deadline: January 20 – March 25
Eligibility: Undergraduates who have some software development experience with Python as well as some exposure to machine learning via coursework, self-study, or other projects
UIUC FoDOMMaT REU (NCSA) is a machine learning focused summer research program where you train hard, then apply what you learn on mentored projects using serious computing infrastructure. You will work with Python, and you are expected to have at least some ML exposure before joining. The projects are usually tied to scientific discovery, so you might be building models or tools that help researchers in other fields. A major part of the experience is open source development, which means your work is visible, reviewable, and meant to be used by others.
Location: Various CISA locations across the country, including Chicago, IL
Stipend: Paid
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: Varies depending on the internship
Application Deadline: Varies depending on the internship
Eligibility: Undergraduates are eligible to apply
The CISA Cyber and IT Internships place undergraduate students within the U.S. government’s primary cyber defense agency, supporting teams focused on infrastructure security and threat mitigation. You will contribute to technical projects such as log analysis, threat emulation, forensic automation, and pipeline development using tools including PowerShell, Python, .NET, and Azure DevOps. The program also offers structured mentorship through sessions with senior staff, exposure to Department of Homeland Security initiatives, and opportunities to engage with former interns and cybersecurity professionals while working on mission-driven projects.
Location: Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL (Chicago area)
Stipend: $650 per week ($6,500 for 10 weeks) + $3,000 housing supplement
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 1 – August 7
Application Deadline: January 7 at 5:00 PM ET
Eligibility: Undergraduates who have completed at least one year as a matriculating student at an accredited U.S. institution, have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, are 18 years or older, and are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents
The Argonne National Laboratory Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) is a DOE-sponsored research program where you work full-time with scientists and engineers on projects tied to the lab's mission areas. You can work in advanced computing, materials science, energy systems, data science, or environmental research. You spend the first week building a research strategy with your supervisor and attending mandatory safety training, then move into hands-on work using advanced scientific instruments and facilities. The program also includes professional development through seminars on current science topics and career pathways. You finish by completing a research report and giving either an oral or a poster presentation.
Location: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL
Stipend: Paid
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: 12 weeks, May – August
Application Deadline: Check here for updates (typically mid-to-late January)
Eligibility: Current undergraduate sophomores or juniors majoring in physics, engineering (mechanical, electrical, or computer), materials science, mathematics, or computer science at a 4-year U.S. college or university with a minimum 3.0 GPA who are eligible to work in the United States.
SIST is the longest-running internship program in the DOE National Laboratory system, and it allows you to work on particle physics research alongside Fermilab scientists and engineers. Your 12 weeks include a structured work assignment, attendance at an undergraduate lecture series, and multiple presentation formats, including oral, poster, and a written research report. The program emphasizes increasing representation of underrepresented groups and women in scientific research, so it actively supports students from those backgrounds.
One other option—the Lumiere Research Scholar Program
If you’re interested in pursuing independent research, consider applying to one of the Lumiere Research Scholar Programs, selective online high school programs for students founded with researchers at Harvard and Oxford. Last year, we had over 4,000 students apply for 500 spots in the program! You can find the application form here.
Also check out the Lumiere Research Inclusion Foundation, a non-profit research program for talented, low-income students. Last year, we had 150 students on full need-based financial aid!
Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a Harvard College graduate. He founded Lumiere as a PhD student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1-1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.
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