The First Internship: My Work as a Cloud Engineer and What to Expect as an Intern

Hello all,
This is my first time here, so I feel a brief introduction may be necissary. My name is Jack Maginnes. I am a rising 2nd year at the Georgia Institute of Technology majoring in Computer Science. In addition, I am currently about halfway through my first internship, which is the topic of this post.

So, after my first year at school, I knew I wanted to spend the summer aquiring some actual hands on expierence. However, with only one year of schooling under my belt, I wasn't sure anyone would actually hire me. In addition, I really had no idea what I was doing in both the application process or the first few weeks of the job. This little blog post is intended to describe my steps in landing the internship and adjusting to 40 hour work weeks as a software developer. Hopefully it will be helpful to those who at somepoint find themselves in a similar position I was in.

Okay, so let me just go ahead and put this out there: I applied to 42 positions, and I heard back from 6. Out of those 6, I recieved 2 interviews. Out of those 2 interviews, I landed exactly 1 job. I am telling you this to just explain that I cast a wide net with my eyes closed and hoped I caught something. Is this a bad tactic? Some would say yes, but I would say it depends on your situation. For me, I just wanted to make a little bit of money and have some applicable job expierence to put on a resume. So I increased my probability by applying to a large number of jobs that looked atleast somewhat interesting to me. Best case senario you end up with multiple offers and actually get to choose!

However, the way I actually ended up getting my internship was noth through a cold application online. Rather, I asked my academic advisior what the best thing to do was with a less-than-stellar resume and no expierence. She told me to attatch my resume in an email and give a brief description of what it was I was looking to do over the summer. Then, send that email out to family, close friends, and pretty much everyone who would be willing to help and not consider it spam. You never know the connections those people may have, and in my case, a friend was able to recommend me for a position and I ended up landing an interview (one of my two) and then an internship.

Here is where my story really gets interesting. I got a job as a cloud engineer intern. I had no expierence working in the cloud and I didn't even know what AWS was until my first day on the job. I didn't lie on my resume or application so how or why they chose me makes no sense, but naturally I freaked out. I took the job because I wanted the work, but I realized I knew nothing that was described in the job description.

So I arrived on the first day scared that I was drastically underprepared and that everyone was going to see me as incompetent. I was a cloud engineer who didn't even know what AWS was... I mean does it get any worse than that? So anyways, day one goes by fairly unevntful. We had internship orientation and then I just got settled into my desk.

Day 2 however, was where my fears were confirmed. I was given my AWS console log in, and told to have a look around. I was also given my first task, which was to write a very basic script in Go to get some files from an S3 bucket. I am sure you all can see where this is going now...I didn't know go either.

Okay so now I am full blown freak-out, thinking I am going to be the first ever intern who is fired in less than a week. However, I decided I needed to settle myself done and actually get to work. So I did what I always do when I need to learn something quickly...I went to youtube. I watched about 2 hours worth of go videos on the specific syntax and how it varied from the OOP concepts I was familair with in java. After that, I read over the AWS sdk for go (at this point I knew AWS was Amazon's cloud and S3 was some type of storage for "items"...whatever that means). I quickly realized that I would no longer be writing functions to list the fibbonacci numbers, as my homework had so falsely led me to believe.

So, after all of that, I start writing my function. Now mind you, 5 weeks later when I look at this thing it is a total joke. Its maybe 15 lines of code that would have taken any expierenced developer 10 minutes max. But it took me probably a good 2-3 hours of very intense concentration with my desktop split half GoLand IDE and half Stack Overflow (am I allowed to say that on here?).

At about 4:30, I finished. I was estatic because it actually worked. I was able to write a function in a language I did not previously know that worked with a service I had never heard of. I made a merge request and pinged my boss. I was expecting the worst, like him to tell me it wasn't efficient or the code was sloppy or pretty much any number of things. But instead, about 2 minutes later I got a message back that said. "That was fast. Looks great, I have accepted your request "

I was so happy I don't think I stopped smiling till I got back to work at 8 the next morning. It just showed me that I was going to be given things that I didn't understand, but with a little bit of concentration and resourcefulness, I could hack together something that was useable. And here we are, 5 weeks later, and I am still doing the same thing. I am constantly working with AWS services I don't know a whole lot about such as DynamoDB, Cloudformation, API-Gateway and more. However, when I just breathe, put away distractions and get down to business, I am typically able to figure it out.

And what happens when I can't? What happens when I get stuck and I cannot figure out where to go? I have learned a new tactic to deal with this. One that is very advanced...ask. Thats right...crazy isn't it.

It took some time to work up the nerve to ask questions because I was worried about sounding incompetent. What I didn't realize at first is that my boss has seen my resume. He knows this is new to me and I am having a ton of stuff thrown at me at once. And so he is always very recieving of even the dumbest questions. So I have learned that if after a few hours I cannot figure something out on my own, it is normally just best to ask for help.

I don't know if this post will be helpful or entertaining to those of you reading it but I hope it atleast inspires you to realize you can tackle tasks you may have previously thought you would never understand.

Happy Programming from your confused intern,
Jack Maginnes