The BostonHacks Intern Life COVID-19 Edition: Jaehei (Jennifer) Kim, Red Hat Intern

Hello there! Please introduce yourself, your role at BostonHacks, and where you interned this summer.

Hi! My name is Jaehei (Jennifer) Kim and I am a junior joint majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics at Boston University. I’ve been a part of the BostonHacks team since my freshman year, and I am the current Head of Marketing for this hacking season.

This summer, I interned at Red Hat as a Software Engineering Intern. At the end of the summer, they extended my internship for this school year as well. Due to COVID, I’ve been working remotely from home and school.

What was the application process like and how did you prepare for the interview?

I had a very unique recruitment experience.

Back in October 2019, a senior manager of the Ceph Storage team at Red Hat had reached out to me over LinkedIn after coming across my resume. He then referred me to a recruiter to schedule an interview, which happened three weeks later, and I received and signed my offer in mid-November.

I prepared for the interview by going through popular behavioral interview questions with friends and leetcoding. I also reached out to many BU upperclassmen who had previously interned at Red Hat to ask about the interview process and the company culture.

To my surprise, this interview was mostly behavioral and getting to know about Red Hat rather than a typical technical interview. I was interviewed by the same manager who reached out to me, and he and I mostly talked about my culture-fit and aspirations.

During the interview, I was honest and transparent about my skill set and limits. However, I did highlight how I have soft skills that will serve to improve on my hard skills if I were given the opportunity to intern and learn. When I asked the manager why he wanted to interview me, he responded: “you can teach people tech and skill, but you can’t teach someone the drive, personality, and culture-fit. We value the potential.” This resonates with me to this day.

What is it like to work remotely at Red Hat?

Red Hat was my first internship, and unfortunately, it became remote due to current circumstances. Overall, working remotely is challenging; you don’t have people around you to talk to, it’s hard to get a sense of time, it can be distracting… BUT I decided to make the best out of it by doing the following:

Desk setup — First day of remote work!

1. I turned my brother’s walk-in closet into my home office. While it only had a makeshift desk, a monitor, and my laptop set up, I really loved having the physical separation of work life and personal life.
2. I got myself into a routine to make sure that my experience resembled that of an actual internship in an office. Red Hat provided us a “work from home guide,” which suggested we take regular breaks to stretch out and get coffee, which I followed. Sites that had office white-noises (https://imisstheoffice.eu/) and my spotify playlists came in very handy to make me feel like I was working with others.
3. I had a rubber duck that I used for “rubber duck debugging,” talking through my code to it as if I was talking to a coworker to process my thoughts. After I’ve filtered out my thoughts, I then reached out to my mentor and manager if I had any lingering questions.

What does an average day look like for you and what are some of your responsibilities?

Over the summer, I was on the Ceph storage team working independently on a “build time analysis project.” This project aimed to look into the Ceph builds stored in an internal database called Brew. I graphed those build durations per build ID or versions, and then analyzed them, finding notable trends and patterns, which got shared with the team.

During this school year, I will be working with the same team on a continuous integration implementation project.

If interested, you can check out my work on my GitHub:

https://github.com/jennkimerson

What are some of the perks of interning at Red Hat?

1. Intern Boot Camp. You get paid to learn! Red Hat provided a series of workshops for PnT (product and technology) interns, giving a crash course of team structures, deep dives of Red Hat products, and a taste of office life and company culture. These workshops were super interesting and served as a helpful overview of Red Hat as a company.
2. Great company culture. There is a memo-list email chain where people are welcome to spark up a conversation with the rest of the company, share cool things, or invite others to ponder on an issue. There are also town hall meetings hosted by the CEO and attended by many associates, where they talk about company-wide announcements and discuss. There, you can observe Red Hat’s Open Source mindset.
3. Work hard, play hard. Red Hat has an amazing perk called Recharge Day, where all associates and interns get a paid Friday off per quarter to clear off our minds over the long weekend.

How did interning at Red Hat help you grow personally and/or professionally?

As mentioned in the previous question, I learned about a diverse set of technologies over the course of the 1.5 week-long Bootcamp. Technology tools that were introduced during the workshops were not just Red Hat specific, and were open-source tools that are widely used in the industry, which will be helpful for me to know in the future.

Outside of boot camp, the most important skill I learned was communication. Due to the nature of remote work, communication is KEY to stay in touch with your team. I had a weekly 1:1 meeting with my manager and a daily 1:1 with my mentor, where I had to provide progress updates and was able to ask any questions regarding work and my career goals.

Do you have any advice for those who would like to intern at Red Hat or any advice about interning remotely?

Go to intern events. Yes, as an intern, you should be working hard. But you should also take a break, step away, and enjoy other aspects of your internship. Specifically for Red Hat, they had many intern engagement programs, such as bi-weekly Trivia night and virtual happy hours. There, I was able to meet new people that I got to befriend.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. I was once too scared to ask upperclassmen about job interviews or get help, thinking that they’d judge me. This was definitely NOT true. Find people who have experience in the field or have had an internship at a company you are interested in. More often than not, they will help you.

Any final thoughts?

BostonHacks teammates and our alumni network helped me so much throughout the process. From their insightful advice to moral support, I would not be where I am today without them. :)