If you are in your first or second year, the standard advice is to wait. The big summer internships are written for juniors, and the honest reading of most postings is that you are a year or two early.

That advice is wrong in one specific way. A parallel set of programs exists precisely for students who are too early: paid first and second year internships, short insight days, semester-long virtual academies, multi-week fellowships and work-integrated degrees. Many of them feed directly into the junior-year internship you were told to wait for. This is a list of 50 of them, covering the United States and Canada, with the well-known global programs included.

Verify every row before you apply. Programs, eligibility and dates change constantly, and many of these run seasonally, so they look closed between cycles. Nothing here invents acceptance rates, pay or outcome guarantees. Where a row says to check the current cycle, that is a real named program that may not have an open posting right now.

Where the 50 programs sit

Counted by the industry the program recruits into, not the team you would sit on. The quant trading firms appear under Tech when the program itself is engineering-first.

Programs by industry Tech has 18 programs. Finance, investment banking and markets has 18. Consulting has 10. Other, covering accounting, nonprofit pipelines and open source, has 4. Fifty in total. Tech 18 programs Finance 18 programs Consulting 10 programs Other 4 programs

Types covered: early insights, sophomore and first-year programs, spring weeks, diversity recruiting, fellowships, pre-internships and student pathways that feed recruiting.

How to read a row

Who is the year and background the program is written for. What is the program itself, including whether it is paid. When is the application window, which is almost always earlier than the program. The link goes to the company's own page, because that is the only place the current dates are correct.