The Internship That Changed Everything | Software Engineering Internship in NYC
My NYC Software Engineering Internship Experience
Hey everyone, in this article, I’ll explain to you what my internship experience in New York City has been like.
My experience is one that I learned a lot from, and I want to share my main takeaways. Also, it wouldn’t be a great video about my New York experience if I didn’t talk about New York pizza a bit. So, I’ll go over 2 of the best pizza places that I went to, 1 of which has $1 pizza.
Video Version
Here’s the video version if you prefer to watch the video. Enjoy!
Interview
So I’ll begin by quickly going over my interview process for the internship. So my internship was with American Express in their New York headquarters.
They held a recruiting event at my university, so I talked with a recruiter for the initial resume screen. Then, I scheduled 2 rounds of technical in-person interviews. After that, I received a final offer letter from them.
So for that summer, I flew to New York and worked in the American Express Tower.
During my first week, we had orientation where we went over the structure of the internship program, received our computer equipment, and met with our respective teams.
My Project (Version 1)
So the first version of my project was to create a chatbot to work with clients to efficiently address their questions and issues. However, this version of my project was quickly scraped within my first week of the internship.
My Project (Final Version)
So I switched from the chatbot project to my final project, which was to create an Excel file normalizer to standardize formatting. Since American Express has numerous clients, they have a lot of data with various permutations of the same type of data.
For example, there are many ways to write a date or an address. So they needed a way to take in all of this data and standardize the format of the data to more efficiently make sense of the data. With the standardized data, they wanted to perform data analysis to provide the best financial options to clients based on informed decisions from data analysis. Previously, this standardization process was done by a third party.
With my internship project, I replaced that vendor relationship by creating an Excel file normalizer to standardize formatting.
I uncovered useful features for classification using Python, Hadoop, Hive, MapReduce, and PySpark. For context, I only knew Python before this internship, so I learned most of these tools during my internship.
So I used a Random Forest model and created Precision-Recall curves to quantify and visualize the comparative performance of my model on the various columns in the data set. Overall, my model had a 5–10% increase in predicting the column of data in the data set.
Main Takeaways
Now, I’ll go over my main takeaways from my internship experience.
The first takeaway is to be flexible in learning new skills in your internship.
As I mentioned earlier, my internship project changed in the first week of my internship. Despite this sudden change, I still managed to meet the deadlines for my internship even with less time than usual. Even if you end up working on the same project from beginning to end, it’s still good to be flexible and learn new skills and take on more responsibilities.
The second takeaway is to make time for 1-on-1’s with anyone that you’re interested in learning about their background and career path, whether they’re on your team or not. I met with software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and business people, all of whom were on different teams. I learned so much from their background and experience to make informed decisions on my career journey.
Also, during my internship, I worked cross-functionally with Product Managers and the Business team to meet the business use case. So, I naturally met with other people and learned from them. It’s a great way to connect with other people and build your professional network. I’d recommend asking to follow them on LinkedIn since a few people I met with actually endorsed me for certain skills on LinkedIn.
The third takeaway is to enjoy your free time outside of work.
Even though I wanted to demonstrate great performance at my internship, I also wanted to take advantage of my time in New York since it was my first time there.
So, I explored as much of New York as I could. I visited the Nintendo store and Times Square, the Vessel in Hudson Yards and the MET, the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island.
I even took a trip to Boston with some friends, which was a great experience.
The next takeaway is to go to any meetups or events in the area, whether they’re professional or social events. It’s another great way to meet new people and get involved in a topic that you’re interested in.
For AmEx in particular, they held several events throughout the internship just for interns to learn from executives and senior engineers about the future of tech and business at AmEx. They were great events to learn about AmEx and their future tech and business projects.
I also attended other company events, one of which was with Lyft. It was a great event to learn from Lyft engineers about their tech and, at the time, their Level 5 division. Also, it was a great way to meet other summer interns from other companies.
I also attended an event at Facebook, where I got to get an office tour from a Facebook engineer. I saw their Instagram portion of the office and saw the rooftop view. It was another amazing experience.
Pizza
Now, it wouldn’t be a New York video if I didn’t touch on 2 of the best New York pizza places.
Joe’s Pizza is an iconic New York pizza place. The pizza is amazing, and many celebrities have eaten at Joe’s Pizza, so I highly recommend it.
Another great option is 2 Bros Pizza. They have some of the best $1 pizza slices, and you can’t go wrong with $1 pizza at this place.
Now, if you’re concerned about the high prices in New York, just spend it on the company card.
I’m just kidding of course. I didn’t receive a company card, and I wouldn’t recommend spending it on frivolous purchases.
Living Situation
However, one way I saved money during my time in New York was that I actually lived in New Jersey. I lived in a New Jersey Airbnb with 3 other people to save money and commuted to New York. It’s also a great way to explore parts of New Jersey.
So I hoped you found a lot of value from this article.
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