A few days ago I was offered and then accepted a full-time software engineering position where I am currently working as an intern for the past 5 months. As I near the end of the internship, I’ve been asked to report on my overall experience. I applied for the software engineering position in late March, and was offered an opportunity to apply for an internship a few days afterwards. I went through 3 meetings – a 30-minute informational meeting with an engineering manager, an hour-long technical interview with 2 engineers, and then a meeting with another engineering manager when I was informed I would be offered the internship. In mid-May I accepted the position. I was really grateful because I had applied to several summer internships the summer before and was not offered even one position.

I have been in education the past ~25 years (teaching math/CS, facilitating PD) and was a CS high school teacher for 6 years before my internship began. I have never worked outside of an educational setting so this internship felt like I was starting over again as if I was a fresh college grad!

Although a remote position, engineers are expected to attend several recurring meetings:

• All staff meetings (1x / week)
• Engineering / Product meetings (1x / week)
• Daily standup (daily except for Wed) 
• Product and Engineering + Teaching and Learning Sync (1x / week)
• Meetings with my mentor (1-3x / week)

I was initially working within a smaller team of about 4-6 engineers and manager. But recently 2 of the teams merged into 1 team with size 9 people (engineers, manager, and product manager). I prefer the smaller size because we’re able to talk more in-depth about our tasks and issues. With 8-10 people, you just want to go quickly to not hold up everyone else.

I was assigned 2 big projects which I was able to solve successfully (big sigh relief). The first project was a relatively familiar one to a lot of engineers and when I was able to resolve, my manager asked me to demonstrate the solution during a monthly demo meeting. I was quite nervous, but afterwards, the CTO reached out to me and congratulated me on it which was very cool!

I have worked on various tasks, and I think that the common denominator among tasks I enjoy is the collaboration. I enjoy discussing different approaches with my peers and messaging on Slack back and forth about different problems/issues. For my second task, I had to upgrade a package that not many current engineers are familiar with. It was the least enjoyable part of my internship because I hesitated to reach out to others knowing it was a heavy lift since most did not have the context. But eventually, I did meet with my mentor and spent about 45 minutes explaining the background. Afterwards, he gave me some fantastic insight, and it was worthwhile. Also, it increased the bus factor of the project!

My internship ends on November 18, and then my full-time position begins on November. I am 5 months shy of 50 years old and about to embark on a completely new career pathway. And I’m really looking forward to it…