Free Geek often has volunteer internships available which may help you beef up your resumé or meet a school requirement.

These volunteer internships are challenging and competitive learning experiences. While we cannot offer our volunteer interns a salary, we do offer job skills training, letters of recommendation, and resume assistance upon request.

Please follow these steps to apply for an internship:

1. Figure out which internship matches your interests. You’ll find short descriptions of each internship as well as links to longer descriptions at the bottom of this page.
2. Fill out this form.
3. Free Geek’s Internship Program Coordinator will call you within one week after receiving the form to check in and be sure that the internship you’re applying for would work best for you and Free Geek. If appropriate, she’ll schedule an interview for you with your prospective Free Geek supervisor or tell you that you might not be a good fit at Free Geek. If you get an interview, you should continue on down the list, and:
4. Take a tour of Free Geek to check out our facility and culture. We offer tours at noon and 5 pm every day Tuesday through Saturday. We’ll need you to do this step before interviewing.
5. Come here for an interview at the time that you agreed to. We’ll see if you’d be a good fit for Free Geek, and you should see if Free Geek would be a good fit for you. We’ll contact you within the next day or two with our decision.

If you get the internship, good for you! Please bring in all relevant paperwork on your first day.

If you’ve tried, but can’t understand what to do, or have a question, please use this inquiry form so we can clear things up.

Thanks for your interest in Free Geek,

Laurel Bates
Education Coordinator
Free Geek
1731 SE 10th Avenue
Portland, OR 97214

Finding out more about which Free Geek internships are available

Our internships vary widely in what they have to offer: some are longer, some shorter, some require lots of people skills, some require the intern to be alone for long stretches. You can use the brief internship descriptions below to help you figure out which Free Geek internship would fit best with your interests, skills, and personality. If one of the short descriptions peaks your interest, click on its link to view the full description. If, after reading the full description, you think you’d be a good fit for the internship, follow the steps listed above to apply.

If you don’t find an internship that would work, keep checking back: this page is updated periodically as new internships become available and current ones become filled.

Which internship interests you?

• Do you have some hardware knowledge, but want to gain more? Want to create new hardware tests, teach those tests to others, and document them? The Advanced Testing Internship might be for you.
• Interested in learning about and working with a variety of businesses and non-profits in the area, telling them about Free Geek? Our Community Outreach Internship is a great short-term, special project.
• Do you have some experience troubleshooting and configuring Linux? We need someone who can do some bug reports and usability QAs for our distro. Our Adopters will thank you! Distro Internship
• Want to improve your education skills by documenting process and information for new volunteers? This is an excellent opportunity to bolster your volunteer coordination skills, too!Education and Documentation Internship.
• Our hardware donors keep us going! Help assist them with their gizmos, get the stuff where it needs to go in our building, and teach new volunteers to do the same with our Hardware Donations Internship.
• Do you love giving stuff away? Do you enjoy working with community organizations in the Portland area? If so, the Hardware Grants Internship might be for you.
• Need some office experience? We’ll give you email and phone practice, and teach you how to navigate through the people and procedures of a vibrant non-profit — all valuable skills! Check out Free Geek’s Office Support Internship.
• Want to learn all about printers and scanners, how to test them using Linux software, and repair them using your oh-so-deft fingers? Do you also have a burning desire to teach others what you’ve just learned? Check out our Printer Reuse and Recycling Internship.
• Moving big stuff. You love it. You also like people and teaching them how to move big stuff and disassemble little stuff. You like warehouses. You’ll want to look into our Recycling Internship.
• If you enjoy working with people, would like to teach and be available to our volunteers for questions, would like to manage an area, have a bit of hardware knowledge, and would like to learn more about hardware, you should check out our System Evaluation Internship.
• Would you like to teach others how to use computers and broaden your knowledge of the user interface in the process? You would be interested in our Adoption Class Teaching Internship.
• If you enjoy working with people, would like to help solve some of their computer issues, learn new computer software relatively quickly, and know a bit of Linux command line and text editing, look into our Technical Support Internship.
• Our thrift store makes much of the income that keeps our doors open. Help keep it tidy and educate customers about computer hardware and Linux software in our Thrift Store Internship.
• Let prospective new volunteers and donors know what’s so incredibly awesome about Free Geek. Throw in some facts and figures, and a joke or two for good measure. Be our public face as a Tour Guide Intern.
• This important intern helps us educate our volunteers about the myriad opportunities at Free Geek, and keeps them coming back. If you’re interested in non-profit volunteer coordination type jobs, you should check out our Volunteer Retention Internship. This internship is currently unavailable.
• Love numbers? Are you a stickler for making them all add up correctly? You might be the right person for our Bookkeeping Internship.
  This internship is currently unavailable.