With one internship experience under my belt, I had a better time during this recruiting season in terms of interviews. Amazon was the only company to give me an offer for next summer.

Remote Internship

When COVID-19 struck in mid-March, I anxiously awaited an update from Amazon on my internship. They decided to conduct the experience remote, and I am grateful that my internship was not canceled as were other students. Amazon shipped me the necessary IT equipment for me to conduct my role at home effectively.

I worked in the Routines team at Alexa, making use of several AWS technologies and learning about Alexa API’s. For confidentiality, I cannot disclose further details than this.

To summarize, my internship experience consisted of the following:

1. Onboarding to Amazon culture and tools
2. Understanding my team’s codebase
3. Writing a design document for my project and obtaining approval
4. Implementing my solution and submitting code reviews
5. Writing unit and integration tests
6. Demoing my project with an Alexa device

Quickly I learned that I was not fond of a remote internship experience. Thinking back to my experience at UPS, I thrived off my coworker interactions, seeing what they were up to. In a way, it held me accountable for my own work as well. At home my work ethic rapidly devolved. For the first time, I had genuine concern whether I would be able to finish a CS project.

With the help of my mentor and some late nights, I was able to pull together a full demo of my project. Proud of my work, I looked back and felt that the struggle was worthwhile. I also realized that learning is quintissential for an internship experience. I learned alot about internal Amazon technologies, but implementing my project required only knowledge in Java. Though I got to learn about Java 8 technologies, unit testing libraries, and integration tests, I realized much of the reward derived from my previous internship was delving into languages and technologies that I had never touched before.

Second Remote Internship?

The third week before my internship ended, my school Purdue was looking at plans to open up. Fearing the rise in cases if thousands of college students congregated at a university, I was advised to continue my internship instead. I made a request to my manager, and she granted me a 12 week extension. I could continue to wait out the COVID-19 crisis from my home.

I was given a project with a larger scope than my first. This one involved much more cross-team communication and detailed design. I spent longer on the design process this time, but I generally followed the same workflow outlined above.

During this project, because the scope was so large, I had the opportunity to learn about Amazon’s deployment process, AWS techologies like Lambda, DynamoDB, EC2, SQS, SNS, and Google Guice.

12 weeks of a remote internship was tough. 24 weeks was worse. Ultimately, I was glad that I did not pursue online learning. COVID-19 took away much of what I looked forward to in an internship, from living in Seattle, seeing my coworkers, and interacting with other interns. I received a return offer at the end. But I could not do another remote internship next summer.