Software Academy Intern Review

As a software engineer, the day-to-day activities included participating in the daily morning standups and other agile ceremonies that occur on a sprint basis. I also participated in ideation and refinement sessions within the team. The rest of the day was focused on completing my intern project and balancing that with a project I worked on outside my team with other interns. As an intern, I was expected to spend 70% of my time on my intern project and the rest on the project outside my team.

I learned how to use React and learned a lot about testing. Prior to the internship, I had minimal knowledge of unit testing and no knowledge of functional testing. After the internship, I feel more confident in my ability to write tests. I was able to learn about best practices and improve my test cases by working closely with software engineers and quality engineers in the team. I also got hands-on experience with the CI/CD tools and learned about AWS components.

I was given full ownership over my intern project and the objectives were loosely defined, which meant that I could come up with my own ideas and solutions and receive feedback from the team. My team had also prepared plenty of stretch tasks in case I finished too early. I also got to take on the role of scrum master for a sprint during my internship which included taking ownership of and organising the sprint planning and sprint retrospective agile ceremonies.

The support was phenomenal. The whole team were supportive, and I always had someone to consult. I was assigned a mentor whom I could ask for help whenever I needed to guide me on the right track. Since my mentor was a recent graduate student, I felt at ease and felt that they could relate well to my experiences. I also took the guidance of quality engineers on my team when finalising my test cases, which I found very helpful.

The company had the best work-life balance I'd seen. Everyone was extremely friendly and was always enthusiastic to share about what they were working on. The team were also keen to drop what they were doing and help me if I needed anything. Several intern events were organised, almost on a weekly basis, which shows that the company really cares about its employees. The office was open and wasn’t split into different cubicles, which provided a very friendly atmosphere, and you always bump into people you know.

I thoroughly enjoyed my placement and learnt much more than I thought possible in the 10 weeks. I felt very welcomed from the start of the internship and felt like a valued member of the team throughout. I also learnt a lot about other roles within the company, which would have been difficult if I had not taken this internship opportunity. The great company culture and work/life balance were definitely a big surprise given that it is a big financial institution.

Yes

I would advise others to reach out to current employees to learn about the different 'outcome teams' within Capital One to find out which team might be best suited for them. In terms of skills, I think that having a willingness to learn and work with each other is a must because the role of a software engineer requires you to tackle new challenges on a daily basis in areas which you may have no prior experience with. Particularly at Capital One, there is an emphasis on working together and pairing on sprint stories.