Software Engineer Intern Review

Capital One have been fantastic in so many ways. I’ve been blown away with the amount of fun I’ve had and skills that I’ve learnt from my time here. I almost wish I could not go back to uni and stay! I’m impressed with how organised the training and intern socialisation sessions have been considering the short time frame to move to remote working, and I can’t think of anything that they couldn’t have done better.

I worked with two teams on my internship, and I felt such a part of both of them. Despite being an intern my opinions were valued and there were quite a few suggestions I made that were taken on board by my main team despite being the newest/least experienced member. I was even given the opportunity to lead my main team for a week, and I was trusted to come up with designs for our project by my secondary team. I’m sad to say goodbye to my team.

I had weekly meetings with my manager, who was willing to advice me on any questions I had and deal with any problems. At one point I had wifi trouble and he immediately got an ethernet cable sent to me so that I could attend my meetings without connection drop outs. My mentor and buddy who supervised me were both invaluable and we found the perfect balance of working autonomously and getting help when I needed it.

I definitely always had something to do! There was the occasional day where I got a bit zoom fatigued because there were so many meetings, but this is something that definitely improved over time as we had less training sessions. By having a main project and secondary project, I was able to fill time where I was waiting on main project things to work on my secondary project, so I was never sat with nothing to do.

From day one, we were really respected and trusted. Once we’d completed some initial training sessions, we were able to work on real code for real projects. I personally worked on a feature which is being put into production on the website, and I was given the chance to be responsible for that feature. This involved making important decisions on the project, and demoing to stakeholders and to the design team. It felt like I was really part of the team and working on projects that would really impact the customers.

There are so many skills that I’ve picked up from my time here. I’ve learnt so many technical skills for web development and in general. I also got to learn about taking a project from plans to production. I’ve also learnt many in team skills such as working with agile practices and how to provide value to a team. I also learnt so much about presenting, leading a team. An interesting aspect was also learning to work remotely and manage meeting fatigue. I also got to learn about areas I didn’t directly work on such as AWS

I was surprised to find that the atmosphere was still apparent despite being a remote internship. Everyone clearly really enjoys working there, and wants to create the best experience possible for the interns. There were lots of sessions with the other interns and some grads to socialise and give us some exposure to what it’d be like if we’d been in the office. We also had some really interesting talks from both internal and external speakers.

Everything was so well organised, we had really well structured training sessions for the first few weeks, and really interesting socials such as virtual escape rooms. We had weekly intern sessions which allowed us to not only relax a bit but also ask any questions we had. There were a couple sessions which were put into our calendars but not explained for a few days, but this was only a minor issue and something that was improved upon.

Not only did we have a great range of training sessions, from soft skills to technical skills, we were also given access to several online training resources which allowed us to learn about anything we felt we were interested in. We also had mentors and buddies who we could ask to run through anything we wanted more specialised training on. We were provided with lots of physical resources such as a laptop and accessories, and anything we needed in order to do our jobs remotely.

The grad program has been really well highlighted to us, and some interns are given an offer at the end of the internship. I’m personally really hoping for an offer as I’d really like to come back. In the event of receiving an offer we have the flexibility to defer the offer to after finishing university study. The internship has been a really good opportunity to get a taste of what the grad program has to offer.

We were given so many opportunities to spend time together as interns, impressively so for a remote internship. We had two drop in sessions a day for us to socialise at the beginning and end of the work day. We also had lots of extra sessions to play games or do challenges. It was definitely less social than it would have been if we were in the office, but for a remote internship it was a good social scene.

I worked remotely so I can’t say for sure, but I had researched accommodation before COVID-19 had started. Like with most cities, it’s not the cheapest, however the office is very close to the station so it’d be possible to commute in from a cheaper to rent area.

Once again, I worked remotely, however I’d attended a networking meet up session before the internship. The nightlife seemed to be very vibrant, there’s lots of options for bars and nightclubs.

There were so many activities to get involved in. There were talks and sessions on topics related to work. There were also intern sessions to play games after work on Fridays. My main team also had weekly after work sessions With other teams which alternated between online games and boardgames. There was also the opportunity to help run online sessions to teach school children about programming, which was a nice way to give back to the community.