Aloha!
Most of you probably already know me but in case this goes viral let me quickly introduce myself: My name is Hamza and I'm currently studying Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering at BITS Pilani. Last year, I accepted a summer internship at Salesforce. I'll be very honest, before I joined I had little to no experience working in a corporate. So, when I was offered this opportunity I started searching online trying to get a glimpse of what it is like and coming up short. So as I wrap up my internship after 8 short weeks, I've decided to pen down my experience here in the hopes that it will help provide some insight to that excited incoming intern curious to know what to expect from their first big internship. Another, more personal, reason is I wanted to have a blog post capturing the memories I have made this summer to come back to years down the road as I reminisce about the place where my career began. I've split up my experience into 4 major sections: Onboarding, Social Events, VTO, Hackathon. I've left out my project — mainly because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to disclose it, but it was a rewarding experience where I finally got to apply some of the things I've learned over the years to a real life use-case.
Onboarding
Salesforce #futureforce has a unique onboarding experience. We got our offers in the second half of September but our internship was to start in June. This meant we had a lot of time between receiving our offers and the actual joining date. Throughout this period, the onboarding team kept reaching out frequently and setting up small meets to give us updates and clarify any doubts. Not only did these meets act as a way to curb the anxiety about the timeline and status of our internships, they also acted as icebreakers where we got to know each other months before we even joined. The team provided a really smooth experience at each stage from signing the legal documents to shipping and receiving our hardware (we got MacBook Pros).
Skipping forward to a week before the actual joining date, the team hosted a session to let us know what all to expect during our first week, which is spent entirely on onboarding new interns. I remember joking to a friend that they have an "onboarding session for the actual onboarding session" — that's just how thorough the team is. During the first week, they got us up to speed on the workings of the company, the tools used (Slack, Quip, GSuite, Org62, Trailhead), while also getting us access to the codebases we were going to be working on. We also had our first connects with our mentors and managers where we were briefed about our projects. As far as I know, all of us got really interesting projects from implementing IR models, working on bots, creating dashboards on the Salesforce platform, to implementing full stack solutions to niche developer problems.
Social Events
I'll go over this briefly since this was a different experience for everyone. For us, the team set up two activities: an icebreaker chit-chat session on Gatheround and a virtual escape room where we were split into teams of 4 and had to race other teams in escaping from the room by solving puzzles. These activities provided us with the initial push to start interacting with each other and soon we started setting up weekly game nights and virtual movie parties on our own.
We also had a fun Global Coffee Chat program where interns could put up their profiles on a global directory and reach out to others to setup 1-on-1 virtual coffee chats. During the summer, I had around 10 such chats and met a lot of interesting people from around the world, connecting on various things like music, chess, gaming, and even Indian food recipes!
VTO
Salesforce has an amazing 1-1-1 model which dedicates 1% of the company's equity, 1% of its product, and 1% of employees' time back to the community. We could take Volunteer Time Off (VTO) which is paid time off to volunteer for causes important to us. I have logged 6 VTO hours this summer contributing to research through the Penguin Watch and NASA Globe Cloud Gaze projects on Zooniverse but definitely, the most impactful thing I've done is help students from underserved communities make their resumes. These students come from struggling backgrounds and have spent a year in a residential program hosted by Navgurukul where they learned programming and soft skills. They are going to be applying to jobs in the coming months and we helped them make their resumes and shared our experiences with the hiring process. Hearing about some of the things they have gone through in life and seeing how determined they are to make it was a really humbling experience.
Hackathon
Some of the best advice I've received during my college years is "Say Yes". If you've seen Yes Man starring Jim Carrey, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then I highly encourage you to watch it. So when a friend asked me if I wanted to take part in the InTurn Innovate Hackathon, I said yes without a second thought. We partnered with two more interns and a mentor to form our team LiteForce. We then spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas and then implementing them within a short deadline. This forced us to skip the small talk and go straight to trusting each other. I'd say this is probably one of the best ways of meeting and getting to know new people. We managed to win which put us in the spotlight with managers and directors reaching out to us to learn more about the project and congratulating us on our win!
All in all, it was a really amazing summer. I'm thankful to everyone at Salesforce for this wonderful experience. I'm also thankful to my seniors who answered all of my questions and doubts before I even accepted the offer. Now it is my turn to carry on that goodwill. If you have any questions or just want to connect, feel free to reach out — my DMs are always open!