Picking up from my last post, During the winter and spring 2022 terms I was doing an internship full-time while continuing to take classes in my spare time. Things were going well, however, my internship was not a true software engineering internship so I was still on the lookout to secure a SWE internship for summer 2022. To my luck, I eventually received an OA invite to a large tech company.
Since this company is widely known, there is a whole list on leetcode of commonly asked coding problems from the company. The assessment invitation was set to expire after 5 days so I spent all of my spare time working through the list of problems.
On the fifth day it was time to take the assessment. It had two questions and to my luck, I had studied a problem very similar to one and the other was a BFS which I considered myself to be very strong in. I passed all test cases for the assessment and made it to the next round! The second round was another online assessment testing my decision making and debugging skills. This round was challenging but I managed to make it through to the final technical interview round.
The final interview went very well! My interviewer was super friendly and asked me a number of behavioral questions along with two coding questions. The coding questions were tough but I managed to pass all the test cases for both of them. Since I have a lot of experience with behavioral interviews, I was able to come up with good answers for all the questions and left the interview feeling confident.
About a week later I received the good news that I was receiving an offer for a software engineering internship for the summer of 2022 in Seattle! I was beyond excited and for the first time during this program I felt that I was finally starting to achieve my goal of switching careers to be a software engineer.
In June, I packed up a couple bags and flew across the country to Seattle for my 3 month stay. I was ecstatic to be there and could not wait to get started on my internship.
My second internship was an awesome experience. My team was friendly and super eager to help me learn. I had a variety of projects I worked on which which were mostly back end using Java, but I also worked on some front end React stuff as well. I really enjoyed each project I worked on and was thrilled to finally be using all the skills I had been studying during my time at OSU. Although my projects were challenging, and at times I felt completely lost, I was able to complete each project through guidance from my team and studying the code base of other projects within the company.
At the end of the internship, I was happy to be informed that I would be receiving a return offer in my home city of Boston. It was an amazing feeling to receive a return offer and it is still something I am very proud of. This term I am studying full time as I complete my final 3 classes and gear up to begin my new job in January 2023.
It’s been a long, challenging, and rewarding journey deciding to change careers and enroll at OSU. When I started the program almost two years ago I knew almost nothing about computer science. Since then I have learned tons about software engineering and the skills it takes to succeed as one.
I can’t wait to start my new career this January!
