Interned at Citadel the summer after my junior year (CS, top-10 school, for context). Got the return offer. This is what that process actually looked like.
The internship experience. The summer program is well-structured. You're paired with a mentor, you have a defined project, and there are mid-summer and end-of-summer presentations. My project was real work, not tutorial busywork. I was building tooling that the team was actually going to use. The quality bar for intern work is higher than at some other places I've heard about.
The pace was intense for an internship. I was working 9-10 hour days pretty consistently. Some interns found this exciting. Others were quietly not okay with it. I was in the first camp that summer, but I've seen people since then who weren't.
The evaluation. At midpoint you get feedback from your mentor. At end of summer your mentor and their manager fill out a structured evaluation form. They look at technical contribution, communication, coachability, and whether you "fit the culture." That last one is somewhat fuzzy but in practice I think it means: do you take feedback without getting defensive, do you ask smart questions, are you someone the team would want in the office every day.
The return offer. I got mine about three weeks after the internship ended. SWE new grad, Chicago, the offer was around $185k base with a signing bonus I won't share specifically. There's a performance bonus from year one. The offer had a deadline of about three weeks which felt tight when I was juggling full-time recruiting, but they granted a brief extension when I asked.
I ended up accepting. Started six months ago. A lot of what I observed during the internship has held up. It's demanding, the people are sharp, and I'm learning a lot fast.
Happy to answer specific questions about the summer program or the conversion offer structure.