North Carolina is a pretty good place to live; I could imagine raising a family around here. There are a ton of trees, the traffic isn't as bad as everyone had warned us about, there are jobs, there's education around, there's minor league teams (and a major league hockey team, if hockey ever starts back up).
The commute to work is about 10 minutes; it then takes about 5 minutes to walk from the car to the office. IBM has quite a few buildings (30+?)in Research Triangle Park, and even has a few campuses in RTP. I work in the 500 campus, which is the software group location. The company seems a lot older when you first look at it, at least compared to last summer, but then I see a bunch of mid 20 somethings walking around, and I know they're not interns. Their work policies are very family oriented.
The Extreme Blue lab is pretty cool - it's a cave though, no windows to the outside, and the windows we have to the inside are always kept closed. We do have a lot of fun things inside the lab, like a server room just for us, competition DDR pads hooked up to a PS2, and foosball. I've been working 8:30-6:30 so far, but during crunch times I'm sure that'll increase. Some people have already been logging 65 hour weeks.
However, from talking to full timers who did the Extreme Blue program previously, it sounds like it's not as cool working in the rest of the company. I'll definitely consider IBM for full time anyway. My dream job is programming with travel, at least right out of school, and there's a possibility for something like that at IBM.
I also realize this summer that I like the lab environment, the research setting, knowing that cool new things are happening that have never been done before. I like attending technical presentations and learning what other people are doing. I really want to work at a company ahead of the cutting edge (Bleeding edge, if you will).
So in summary: the summer in North Carolina has been pretty good so far!
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