My internship with TD Labs

The team I had a privilege to work with

This was my third work term as a co-op student with the University of Waterloo. I was a mobile/frontend developer with TD Labs, which is TD Bank’s innovative lab space to create and test early-stage projects for the bank. Without a doubt, I can say that this was my favourite co-op placement so far. Here’s a few reasons why:

The Responsibility

I was initially placed on a team consisting of three full-time developers. One of them left our company early on during my term, which then left me to pick up the remaining slack and take on more responsibility. Soon after, I was participating in all code reviews, discussing and implementing key features in our projects, and overall feeling more like a full-timer rather than just some other co-op. I could feel that a lot of trust was placed on me to meet the same high standards in work ethic that the full-timers have. Additionally, as an experienced co-op student, I had the responsibility to help show the ropes to first-year student who was working with us. I taught them the basics of regarding git and sourcetree.

Opportunities

In addition to working on the assigned projects we had, we also had an opportunity to work on our own ideas and bring them to life during our two hack weeks througout the term. As the name suggests, our hack week was a week-long hackathon where all of the co-ops from TD Labs had the opportunity to get into teams and hack together an idea related to banking. For our midterm hack week, we even had to opportunity to present our ideas to an executive team from TD corporate. My team’s idea regarding how we could increase user engagement with TD’s credit card program won the hack week, and we were selected to present our idea to a branch of executives at corporate in downtown Toronto.

Experience

Throughout the term, I strengthened my skills in javascript and worked with the famous reactJS framework that everyone’s boasting about! Our team also had the opportunity to work with a beta (as of writing this post) cross-platform open-source framework by Google called flutter. Along with flutter, I got to learn the Dart language and also understand how open-source software is created. It was really fascinating exploring the flutter’s directory, understanding just how a framework is developed.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed my term here at TD Labs. I’ve met a wide variety of interesting and unique individuals during my time here. I’d recommend anyone who wants an exciting and interesting co-op to apply here.