I landed my first internship at Fidelity, one of the largest financial services companies in the world. I was under the scope of an automation developer / tech consultant within the emerging technologies team. Huge thanks to Divya and Andre for taking a chance on me (in hindsight it definitely paid off for the team!).
Now of course this wasn't a SWE role. But I didn't let that affect me. I feel like a lot of people base their work-ethic on the title and compensation of their role but there's so much more to learn when you're genuinely passionate about what you're doing. I was determined to make the most of it and learn as much as I could and I don't mean this sarcastically, I honestly did.
I was putting in well over 50 hour work weeks — a lot of my friends always told me that it was useless to work more hours than I was billed for or that “work-life balance” was important or that “you'll get a return offer” but none of that mattered to me. Frankly speaking, I wasn't even thinking about a return offer. I was just dialed in on Power Automate and the Azure registry lol.
Someone told me to put this into this writeup but they like to say it was the beginning of my summer arc.
This “arc” changed my trajectory for the rest of the year and definitely the rest of my life. I mentioned above that I was putting in more than 50 hour work weeks but simultaneously I was also building and shipping at an insane rate. May–September was honestly a blur. Either I was working for Fidelity or I was coding. And no I don't mean LeetCode, I mean actual full-fledged applicable projects that often encompassed end to end system design.
A lot of you reading this probably are thinking I'm crazy. It was my summer and I was just working? Where's my social life or definition of “fun”? Frankly speaking, I also went out the most I ever did. Out with friends, out with family, random sidequests, you name it. It's crazy how much free time you get when you're self-aware about the things you waste time on. As corny as it sounds, I cut off all my distractions and focused on one thing: improving myself.
I also don't think people understand the level of dedication and commitment it takes to do what I did. And by no means am I saying this to brag, honestly including this for those of you that want to genuinely improve. Right after work, I'd open up my laptop to start building. And more so doing this so consistently that it got to a point where if I didn't do something productive (outside of work) it would feel like a day wasted.
Second term — AI developer
I was offered to come back to Fidelity for the next term for a second internship, this time under the scope of an AI developer! So now it's something down my line of field!
Starting off with my new role at Fidelity as an AI developer, it was a huge personal win. Now that I was moving off of a low-code environment into production ready code overseeing the whole SDLC from requirements gathering to design, development, testing, documentation and deployment, it was the best learning experience I could ask for (besides the corporate access nightmares).
I also met a ton of other cool interns this time around. Just to name a few — Vincent, Nidhi, Adam, Navdeep and a lot more. Whether it was from talking about the next stock that we should invest in to become rich (Vincent), jumpscaring each other for no reason (Nidhi), or saying the task for today was sending a single email during standup (Navdeep), this term is definitely going to be hard to beat. It was all the little interactions that left a lasting impression.
Besides the fun I also had the opportunity to work right under the VP of Data and Technology and Transformation, Nazia, during an internal SDLC discovery project. During this, I built a multi-agent orchestrator that would build a BRD (business-requirements document) for business analysts from just a transcript of a meeting.
Around this time I also had gotten another extension offer from Fidelity to come back again as an AI developer. I don't mean to include this to show off by any means, it's honestly a personal reflection of myself compared to 8 months ago when it came from a last minute offer to now getting head-hunted from different companies.