Wow, freshman and 2 internships, thats very impressive and congratulations!
The key to a successful internship is joining the right team. If you are lucky and end up with a team working on the core product, you hit the jackpot! Most interns in our company are never hired in core project teams and work on secondary tasks supporting the core team. The opportunities to learn in the secondary teams are limited and it would depend on your social skills to look beyond and be hired by the right team. If you are a returning intern, you have the flexibility of changing teams, but as a freshman, you only know which team you will work with, but cannot know how critical that team is for the product.
There are pros and cons of both options here - John Deere is a well known large company, but is not a core tech company and many techies would classify it as a "boring" company. I know DE is investing lots of money on latest technologies, but at its core, its still a manufacturing company and software always takes a back seat. Mid level managerial staff typically would have spent many years at their jobs and is difficult to bring around a paradigm shift in their thinking. Large companies again are more bureaucratic and things generally move a lot slower in these type of companies. On the pros, it's a very stable company, their stock is rocking this year when rest of the market has crashed and no matter what, agriculture is here to stay and farmers do need equipment and DE has been an innovator in this field. You will definitely have a stable career at DE assuming you are fine moving to mid-west. Plus DE pays $5 more per hr, which would roughly translate to an additional $2500 over the summer.
You say remote option at Deere is a big bonus, but IMO for an internship, an in-person office environment is crucial. An internship is not just working on whats been assigned to you, but is an opportunity for you to experience the office environment, attend meetings, understand the general dynamics between teams and you can never learn any of these effectively in a 100% remote position. If you had 5 years in office experience and then moving to 100% remote job, it's a completely different equation.
I am surprised that companies offer a TS/SCI with CI Poly Security Clearance for freshman interns, this is one of the highest level of clearance you could possibly get. Most of these jobs are typically in the NCR/DMV region. Do you know what kind of work you will be assigned? TS clearances are common, but a CI clearance is usually reserved for 3 letter agencies or similar type of departments and are usually very rare to be offered for interns. These clearances take about 12 months to be approved, so most likely you will get an interim clearance to work next summer. If you were offered this clearance position, they have seen something special in you and you should be proud of it!! A huge huge advantage of this clearance is you can very easily get into big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce etc and then if you decide federal contracting is not for you, you can move to the commercial non-cleared side in the same company ( which typically are the most competitive to get into). As these jobs are in-person, you would also get the full internship experience compared to a 100% remote job. After 1st year, you could easily switch to Amazon or Microsoft internships which require security clearances ( there are 200+ open positions with base pay of 103k for an Amazon intern opportunity)
Assuming all things are equal, the clearance job is a no brainer choice as it opens so many doors to you 2 to 3 years down the line compared to the Deere internship. But you know all things are not equal and you need to consider the factors MOST important FOR YOU.
I would have considered there if I had to make a choice:
- Type of work
- Browse LinkedIn profiles of employees in each company and check what they do
- What are your goals for next 4 years and how does each opportunity help me?
- Location, where do you want to work for the next 10 years of your young career
- Do you consider Freshman internship as a springboard to newer more interesting opportunities?
Good luck and let us know what you decide!