Software Engineering: Listen to Regan (2021) talk about her experience in software engineering at Amazon this past summer.

Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up the Duke Career Center's, student produced podcast showcasing real student summer internship experiences. My name is Stephanie and today we're talking to Regan, who worked in software engineering at Amazon this past summer.

Regan: My name is Regan and I am a junior right now at Duke. I am studying computer science, doing a minor in visual media studies. I'm really interested in the intersection of design and software development, so I'm really interested in front-end development.

Stephanie: And where did you work this past summer?

Regan: So this past summer, I was interning at Amazon in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was a software development engineer intern.

Stephanie: It's a fancy title.

Regan: I know.

Stephanie: And how did you find out about that position?

Regan: Yeah. I think that I found out about it either through D-Tech or through my own Googling of like software engineering internship and then enter whatever company name. Did a lot of that, throughout the internship, internship search.

Stephanie: So did you just apply and it worked out?

Regan: So it was actually a very weird process. So, it was not very normal. I applied for this position in October and I heard radio silence literally nothing until March. So finally five months later, I hear back and their like, hey, we want you to do this coding assessment. It was an online challenge where they send you something. So first round, they sent me multiple choice questions and then a second round they sent me was their coding challenge to actually solve this problem by writing code. And then I had a final round interview which was talking video, phone interview, coding and talking to one of their software engineers. And that all happened in March.

Stephanie: And then you got, it all worked out.

Regan: Yes.

Stephanie: So what exactly were you kind of doing day to day? Were you working on a project overall, or were you like you just kind of doing day to day tasks?

Regan: Yeah. So I pretty much the whole summer worked on one project. But within that project I worked on lots of different tasks. So we had an Excel spreadsheet that had over a hundred items that needed to be done. So each day we would just go through and try to check off as many as we could. So we were working on one product within Amazon and then within that I was doing a lot of front end stuff. So I worked very closely with the designer to make the website look really nice. And then also I worked closely with other engineers to see how we would get our data from API's and make everything display really nicely and clean.

Stephanie: This is like a foreign language.

Regan: Sorry, it's basically making things look pretty.

Stephanie: So like the website and stuff.

Regan: Yeah.

Stephanie: The Amazon website.

Regan: Not the actual Amazon website. So I actually was working with AWS, such as Amazon Web Services and Amazon Web Services has a ton of consoles. So a console is essentially a web application or like a website. And so mostly developers use these quote unquote consoles. And we were working on one of those consoles. And and basically it's a tool for developers to improve whatever they're doing. And so we just wanted to make like a product that has a really easy to use user interface so that they could get the information they need quickly and efficiently.

Stephanie: And so did you already have all of these skills going into this? Was there anything you had to learn?

Regan: Yes. Oh, my goodness. Yes. So, I mean, I had to, again, you know, Comp Sci 201, which is kind of the standard for software interviews of what they expect you to know. But I had to learn completely new languages. So I learned React and JavaScript, which I hadn't really done a whole lot of. I had done a Coursera course that included HTML, CSS