Interning At Amazon

My goal is to document some lessons I learned during my first real SWE internship @ Amazon.

Ask Questions

The first two weeks are the only time where you can ask dumb questions and not get penalized. 12 weeks goes by really quickly.

• Schedule 1-on-1s with your teammates to get to know them better. If you're a stranger to them, why would they want to really help you?
• Take notes during meetings. Ideally, recording them would be best.

Intern Diary

I would organize a weekly goal and break it down into dailies. Write down action items and key deliverables.

• Use something like Notion for this.

Fix your Sleep

During school, having a bad schedule is something you can easily get away with. But while you're working, having a better sleep schedule is crucial.

• You'll probably only get 2-3 hours in the morning to do real work.
• After lunch, you're probably not going to be productive. So don't account for this time to make stuff up.

Extra Time

You don't know what you don't know. Take the extra time to really understand code, design documents, etc.

• This works well with point #1. Put in a lot of time because a strong start means a lot.