Software Engineer Intern Review

I had a fantastic experience despite the internship being remote due to COVID. I felt that my manager and colleagues put in a lot of effort to ensure we had an enjoyable experience. I did miss the experience of seeing people in person and being able to have lunch with them at the office, however, I felt that scheduling regular meetings helped a lot. I thoroughly enjoyed the project we were tasked with as well, as I felt we were able to make a valuable contribution.

My colleagues were always eager to take time out of their day to help us out. The quality of feedback on pull requests was outstanding. Not only did they point out areas which could be improved, they would spend time to explain why it was better to do one thing over the other. I also felt valued during the 1:1 meetings I scheduled with my two colleagues am thankful for the advice they gave. The stand-ups were also great - our assigned teammates guided us whenever we hit any blockers. I have learned so much over the three months thanks to the efforts of my colleagues.

My manager was incredible. When I interned with Adobe last year, I gave feedback on my internship experience and I was pleased to see that he took my comments into account. For instance, I really appreciate that my manager scheduled regular 1:1s this year. When I expressed interest on contributing to other Adobe repositories, he made sure to ask engineers for issues I could work on. This year my manager really went above and beyond to provide us a great experience. He pushed to get us opportunities to meet some higher ups (Heads of Engineering and VPs) - learning about their experiences, history, and goals for the company was valuable. He also opened more doors for us to become more familiar with/get known within the wider organization by enabling us to participate in the Intern Showcase Competition as well as giving us a project that could have a real impact on the company. I thankful to have had him as my manager.

On most days, the work-life balance was perfect. I felt that we always had an appropriate amount of work assigned each day. Certain days were definitely more busy than others - in particular before a presentation or demo as there was pressure to get features delivered but those days were not frequent. I never felt that I was bored with work and I have never felt like I didn't know what I should be working on next.

I felt that we were given lots of responsibility with our project. Our teammates and other colleagues reviewed our code as if it were going to be pushed to production, as ultimately that was the goal. Although we did not get to that stage, we were assured that our efforts were valuable. We were tasked to hand over our project to a different team in Adobe. I loved that we were responsible for leading those sessions.

This skills I developed over the internship will definitely be useful. Thanks to feedback from colleagues, I have become a better software engineer. I feel that I am now more able to break down large projects into smaller manageable tasks because of the project we were given. I also feel that I am able to write better tests for my code and this will be very useful for university and beyond. I also think that I am now more familiar with what are good practices and what aren't, because of my colleagues. This will be very useful in the future when I am working in teams and have to review my colleagues' code and pull requests.

N/A - I was not able to go to the office because of the pandemic

The pandemic has made it difficult to socialize outdoors so I find it understandable that there were not any opportunities to meet up and socialize. However, it would have been nice for more online social events to have been organized. I only became aware of certain intern Slack channels later on in the internship - I think it would have been nice to publicize these more. I felt that it was a bit difficult to network with interns in offices around the world.

N/A - due to the pandemic

N/A - due to the pandemic