I'm a college student doing an internship with a startup (shudder) in NYC this summer. I applied with the intent of furthering my web development experience, especially learning about what its like to be developing a production-level website.
Note about the company: this is a startup developing its beta website. It hasn't received any funding yet (it's going for first rounds in the fall). I think the team is just four guys. This internship program appears to be established and they've hired one of their engineers from it before. It has also been ostensibly vetted and approved by my university (I applied from our university's job listings site).
They have two internship teams: two guys are working on developing new features for the site, and the other two are working on maintaining and polishing the existing features (these are the 'hardcore' programmers/engineers).
After two interviews and some idea-generation exercises they had me do and submit via email, it is clear that I am seen as a better fit for the "creative" team. That is, I will be working with two of the founders on new features for the website. I'm not really sure what this means. I made it clear that I want to be programming, but they said I would have experiences to do that.
If I do not get programming opportunities from this internship, which I am participating in with the expectation of having them, is it a bad idea for me to simply leave the program? I will not be satisfied if my time with this startup will be spent simply brainstorming and whiteboarding ideas for them, as I am hoping to get programming experience out of it.
Note: the work expectations are pretty relaxed: I'll only have to commute to NYC (1hr 15min) one day a week, and am expected to be in communication throughout the week via Slack. For this reason I am fine with not being paid. If I had to commute daily and work 9-5 for no pay I would not be doing this.
Edit: Honestly, I accepted this because I only started applying for summer positions in late March/April, and I am grateful to have any sort of position this summer (purely for the purpose of resume padding/hopefully learning about production environments).