A Day in the Life of a Clinc Intern
In collaboration with Michigan FinTech, Clinc is co-hosting a recruiting event on Wednesday, November 28th from 5:30–7:00pm in R0320 Ross School of Business (find more information & RSVP here).
Clinc is the most advanced AI company for enterprise, and fastest growing startup in Ann Arbor. They were started by a professor at the University, and love working with students and the university for various needs.
Several University of Michigan Students have completed internships or are current interns for Clinc. We reached out to a few to get their input on life as a college student at Clinc.
What is your role at Clinc?
Ryan: I am a Software Engineering Intern.
Andrew: Product Management Intern
How long have you been in this role and what is your workload/ involvement like?
Ryan: I’ve been at Clinc since the Summer of 2017, I interned for two summers, Ann Arbor for the first and San Francisco for the second. I’ve also worked part time during the school year.
Andrew: I’ve interned at Clinc the past 2 summers.
How did you go about obtaining this internship?
Ryan: I cold e-mailed Mike, our CTO, asking if Clinc was hiring interns. The company was small enough where I was able to just come in and have a chat with Mike about my prior experience and projects I’ve worked on. My experience was a little different as there was no real technical interview — I just explained how I built some of my projects.
Andrew: First summer involved a phone call with the CTO (company was still very small, <10 on engineering team, second summer I accepted my return offer.
How would you describe the company culture and what did you like/dislike about it?
Ryan: The culture is incredibly fast paced and almost entirely focused on delivery. It’s amazing as the culture forces you to learn on your feet and really take ownership of whatever you’re building. It does cause issues however, things like technical debt and mental health are cast aside in favor of shipping product and hitting deadlines.
Andrew: My favorite part about the company culture is the leadership’s devotion to exploring new opportunities. Many interns (including myself) had an opportunity to explore independent projects during our internships and we had full support from the top-down. One cultural negative is that company is still figuring out its organizational structure. Teams would change multiple times throughout the summer, and I feel like this led to confusion among team members. But as the company matures, I see this becoming less of a problem.
What is your favorite thing about Clinc?
Ryan: I love how fast-paced everything is. There’s constantly a new feature that has to be built or a fire that has to be put out, it really forces you to think on your feet and encourages rapid product iteration. Everybody on the team is extremely hardworking and dedicated to the company’s success, and it really shows.
Andrew: Everyone in the company is extremely supportive. Whenever I had a question, I felt comfortable approaching anyone on the engineering, business, or design teams to help me out — and they were always extremely happy to help!
What kinds of projects did you work on?
Ryan: I was a founding team member of our web platform team and have been on that team for my entire time at Clinc. I got to see the product go from nothing, to getting shipped to customers, to the iteration cycle with customers.
Andrew: My first summer I added voice support for international currencies and built a budgeting feature for a prospective Fortune 100 client. My second summer I designed and built a voice assistant for cryptocurrency traders, the company’s first direct B2C product.
How has working at Clinc allowed you to grow professionally and what did you learn?
Ryan: I learned what it meant to build and iterate on product quickly. It also forced me to learn a lot of new technology as well as how to interact with others in a team.
Andrew: Working at Clinc taught me how to work well with people from plenty of different backgrounds. Infrastructure engineers speak a different language than front end engineers, who speak a different language than design, etc. The key is to understand a bit about what everyone does so you can have effective conversations with anyone at the company no matter what team they’re on.
Do you have any advice for other students considering a future at Clinc?
Ryan: Take ownership of projects you’re working on, constantly look out for opportunities to take some responsibility.
Andrew: Learn about the voice assistant industry and show your passion in the interviews. What application for a voice assistant does Clinc need to explore next?
