When do I make my intentions of return offer clear?

It won't make much of a difference. The point of an internship from the company's perspective is to train and hopefully recruit you, assuming it's a match. The assumption is you'd like to convert your internship to a full-time offer.

With that said, you should treat this like an engineer anywhere else. Create goals for your summer, communicate those goals with your manager, and have open communication about progress and blockers. Those goals should center around things like getting to know people, clarifying career goals, and making an impact. They should not be about securing an offer, which would be a secondary effect of making progress towards your goals. It's company-specific, but by the middle of your internship, conversations around your return will likely start. You definitely don't want to only start them at the end. This will make it clear you want to return and clarify what that process looks like for you.

And remember, this is an opportunity for you beyond getting an offer. You can learn. You can meet people. You can explore your career before starting. Teams love interns for the energy they bring to a project. It can get exhausting for people when interns start talking about returning from day 1, before they even met anyone or got a sense of the team. It makes it seem that much more disingenuous. Bring good energy, learn, meet people, work on some cool things. That's what gets you a return offer, which most companies want to give you anyway. Talking about converting daily will exhaust you and those around you, and you'll get far less from your internship than you would otherwise.

At the end of the day, you can't control whether or how Qualcomm is extending to return offers to interns or not - That decision probably goes up to the CFO or some VP of Finance/Engineering.

This means that you should primarily focus on just being the best intern you can be by being open to feedback, writing good code, communicating well and often, and collaborating with others where applicable - David is 100% correct with this.

That being said, it's not like you need to be completely in the dark about this either. You can go through HR resources to see if there's any information about the overall intern program and talk to other interns about what they have heard. Finally, you can bring it up with your intern manager when you're at least a couple weeks in (I would say 4+ weeks is a good time) and have earned a substantial amount of goodwill amongst the team.

Here's our resources to help you be an amazing intern:

• [Masterclass] How To Write Better Code Faster As A Software Engineer
• Meta Intern Success Series - This is specific to Meta, but I imagine a good amount of it applies to Qualcomm as well given that it's huge
• Alex's Guide To Effective Communication