Name: Jiangxue Han
Class Year: 2022
Major: Computer Science and Linguistics
Hometown: Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Internship Organization: Amazon.com, Inc
Job Title: SDE intern
Location: Seattle, Wash., USA
What’s happening at your internship?
I’m in Amazon’s AWS procurement experience team. I’m working on a project that’s related to the notification system for purchase orders. The current system only notifies customers on purchase order level, for instance, if a purchase order is expiring, the owner will get an email reminder. My project goal is to proactively scan through all of each customers’ purchase orders and decide if they will have no eligible purchase orders for invoice association for the next month. If so, send out notification reminders so that customers will have sufficient time to make modifications to their purchase orders.
Why did you apply for this internship?
This internship is closely related to my major. It’s a great opportunity for me to exercise what I learned in the classroom and see what working in the industry is like. Last summer I did a data science internship, and I’m trying this software engineering internship as well to see the difference and to help me decide what sub-field in tech I’m more passionate about.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
I have learned various internal AWS tools so far in the internship. It has been hard for me because they are all new to me and I don’t have much guidance. It’s also intimidating at first to work on a project with such a big scale of code base and dependencies. This process of learning new tools taught me how to deal with new technologies and difficulties. Doing unit testing is also a new skill that I learned. I believe a lot of the skills I learned so far are transferrable and I have learned to solve problems myself better in this process as well.
Was this internship what you expected it to be?
This is not exactly the internship that I expected it to be. I did expect the general type of project that I will be working on. The team atmosphere and mentorship is very different from what I expected. I only had one summer internship before, so I was expecting that it would be similar. However, I have way less guidance on the project and help this year. It was hard for me to get used to diving deep into problems myself and attempt to solve difficulties myself. The internship is also much more intense than my previous expectation and the timeline is very tight. I do hope that I will be able to finish the project in time and be proud of what I have done by the end of the internship.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.