With QUEST being filled with such ambitious students, it’s no surprise to hear about the impressive and exciting summers its students have! Not only do students gain a variety of internship, research, or work experience, they also make sure to have fun.
Michelle Lui (Cohort 34) interned at Discovery, Inc. as a data science intern working on the Food Network Kitchen app. This was her first experience working in the tech industry, whereas her internship last summer was in consulting. She said, “My favorite part was being able to work with consumer data and conduct behavioral analysis on app interactions. It was also so interesting seeing all the data that is collected and processed behind the scenes in order to make continuous improvements to the product.” Outside of her internship, she went on multiple short trips to new cities including Boston, Portland, New York City, and Ithaca to see friends from both high school and college. During her time in Seattle, she visited the Discovery, Inc. office in person, hung out with fellow interns that lived in the area, and even went to the QUEST meetup where she met someone from Cohort 1! In between, she caught up on some summer reading and says, “If you’re looking for recommendations, my favorites were Pachinko and The Namesake.”
Michelle strolling the streets of NYC this summer
Ben Lin (Cohort 33), like Michelle, also spent his summer in Seattle! He interned at Amazon and got to meet his team in person. Ben said, “A really key thing I learned was understanding when to ask questions and how much to struggle before you do. Interning in person and in the office is its whole own experience, and going bouldering or going to happy hour with the team really gave me the chance to get to know my coworkers as people aside from just engineers.” He explained that interning with a hybrid model gave him the chance to operate with more own autonomy when it came to hours, but being able to just ping teammates in-person to whiteboard/sketch out a solution, debug your code on the fly, or take breaks together humanized the whole process! Outside of his internship, Ben said, “Some super fun things I was able to do was organize the Seattle QUEST Meetup, go bouldering with other interns, go skydiving, white water rafting, and paragliding, do a weekend trip to Oregon, be in an official @insideAmazon day in the life intern TikTok, get cast/filmed in a YouTube video for 10.5M subs, and more!”
Ben at the Amazon Spheres
The Seattle QUEST Meetup with students and alumni!
Jack Liang (Cohort 33) spent his summer interning at SpaceX, working in person every day at the Starbase facility located in Boca Chica, Texas. Specifically, he worked on Structures Design for the nosecone of Starship, which is Space X’s new launch vehicle, currently under development. He said, “Compared to my previous internship at SpaceX, when I was in Los Angeles, the Starbase facility is rapidly growing and still extremely new. Thus, the location resembled more of a construction site rather than an engineering office. I knew beforehand that it’d be hot and humid, but nothing prepared me for how much I sweat!” When I asked how QUEST skills may have helped him during this internship, he said that “with all the repetition and practice I got from QUEST presentations over the years, I became super comfortable with delivering presentations and designing slides.” Outside of work, his favorite part of his summer was hanging out with the other 45 interns at the Starbase facility of SpaceX. Specifically, he went scuba diving off the coast of South Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico where he dove off a decommissioned jack-up oil rig leg and explored a wreck dive 100 feet underwater.
Jack at the Starbase facility of SpaceX
Aadria Bagchi (Cohort 37) interned at LG Ads this past summer and said it was a great learning experience. Beyond learning more about programming and computer science, she learned so much about working at a tech company and how to be an effective member of a team. She explained that this internship differed a lot from past internships because she was more independent and had her own project assigned to her with the guidance of a mentor. At the end, she presented her final project to the team and got so much positive feedback and a return offer for next summer! Aadria said, “Being virtual was difficult, but it helped me learn a lot about the importance of effective communication (through apps like Slack). I hope to be in person next summer though because seeing a team in person and getting to actually go to meetings seems a lot more personable than through Zoom.” Outside of her internship, she went to the beach almost every week with her friends and got to cliff dive and play lots of spikeball. She also went to Pismo Beach (SoCal) for a few days where she surfed and ate a lot of good Mexican food and seafood. She said, “I also cooked (or rather attempted to cook) some food in preparation for living in an apartment this year. It was an interesting experience, and I burned a lot of food in the process, but so far this semester it’s going pretty well.”
Aadria, right, enjoying some ice cream with friends
With a successful summer 2021 in the books, I know QUEST students are ready to conquer a new, in-person semester.