Two months Intern to an Amazonian!

Hi there! 🙋‍♀️ I am Ritika, a final-year student pursuing a B.Tech in computer science at the KIET GROUP OF INSTITUTIONS. I have been a part of programs like Microsoft Learn Student Community, DSC KIET, and a few more. I am the winner of American Express’s Makeathon 2022, and SIH 2022 Grand Finalist. This summer, I interned at Amazon as an SDE Intern and bagged a full-time offer as well at the end.

People usually talk about how to land an internship in FAANG, but it's seldom to find a good resource that can guide what are the “Do’s” one can follow during the internship tenure so as to land a Pre-Placement Offer (PPO). So here I am 😉

It is to be noted that the views represented in this blog are the personal views of the writer and neither of Amazon nor Codess.Cafe.

To ensure a better understanding, the blog is divided into 3 sections.

[1] My internship experience

Amazon has always been my dream company. From fighting to pass all the test cases in the Online Assessment to becoming an intern and then finally an Amazonian, my journey has been stupendous. I bagged the intern offer through the Amazon WOW program in 2021.

If you wish to know more about the program, you can check out this blog by Codess.Cafe.

I did my 2 month SDE internship at Amazon ADS, Bengaluru India. The exposure, the learnings, and of course the zest to learn and tackle something new every day was just AWSome 🤩

Apart from the learning stuff, here are some exciting swags I got while interning 🧡

During my internship, I built a debugging tool using Google Guice, Amazon Coral Service, AWS (Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudAuth), Spring Framework, and SQL. This tool reduced unnecessary ticket transfers to the team along with saving approximately 40–50 minutes per ticket for an on-call SDE.

I also worked in Typescript and AWS CloudWatch to add a generic alarm creation facility for all the services across all stages of production. (Reduced 192 days per year of SDE’s effort )

Within 2 weeks of finishing my internship, I got a notification, and guess what I got the PPO!

[2] Some interesting myths 👀

Let's start with some interesting myths that I came across.

• You can’t get a PPO from a 2 months intern. (like dude why? 🙄)
• People selected from Amazon WOW [a diversity hiring program at Amazon] get less stipend.
• You can’t prove your caliber in just 2 months internship.

Reality:

• Hard work and determination are self-sufficient to clear the haze created by the above myths.

[3] Points to remember while interning :

Now that you have already read about my experience and myths, here are some tips that can help you get a PPO. Note: These tips are not just limited to Amazon, you can follow them for other companies too!

• Prepare Git and AWS in advance (or just get a glimpse of them). Try to have command in Java (or any other language but make sure you are clear with all the core concepts)
• Develop a habit to read and learn (in industries it’s the blogs of your teammates that are actually a savior when you have crashed the production)
• In any big tech, I feel that documenting should be a knack for you. (keep documenting what you learned each day or every 3 days)

Documenting will help you in analyzing your progress, and of course, any other person (say the bar raiser) will get a clear idea of your hard work.

• Be attentive while attending meetings (as in asking doubts make notes, being aware that on what other teammates are working, etc…)
• If you are facing any problems try contacting your mentor or any teammate and get the blocker solved ASAP!
• Actively take feedback from other team-mates [write down the things you have to improve and set an achievable deadline for the same]
• In the first two weeks of your internship, set up a 1:1 connect with all your teammates. (doing this will help you connect and understand the work of your team, including tech stacks, the objective of the products, the flow of information, etc)
• Develop a habit to convert the flow of your code into graphs or flow charts that can be presented to anyone in the future which will help others understand what your code actually does, what services you have used, the flow of information between the services, etc.

This was all from my side. I hope the article helps you achieve your goal. Feel free to reach out to me for any queries through my LinkedIn. Give your best shot and success will be yours!

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