Internship Experience at Goldman Sachs

As a final year student pursuing my bachelor’s in computer science, until the end of my 3rd semester in college I barely even heard of the word “Internship”. Suddenly the whole fuss about coding tests, interviews started and I was clueless. To start with I thought I was just not ready for work which I will be held responsible for, unlike the course projects. But as I went with the flow, I tried for all the opportunities that came my way. I heard about the Goldman Sachs opportunity from a friend who was going to intern there. I applied with zero hope, gave my best shot at the tests and interviews. A month later, I woke up to a mail from Goldman Sachs that read “We would like to extend an offer for you to join us as a summer intern”.

It is safe to say that I had never been that happy before, my eyes teared up. Over the next few weeks, before the internship started, I had mixed feelings. “Will I be able to perform up to par?“ was a question I asked myself frequently beside the “Am I ready to work?” one. Eventually, my internship started, the first week was mostly technical set-up for the online internship and a couple of welcome sessions. I met with my mentor in the second week who gave me an intro to the project that the team is working on and the details of my work. Broadly speaking, I was required to handle the case wherein the API services that the project uses go down. I had no prior experience with the tech/ tools used in the project, so I spent the rest of the week learning from the resources my mentor pointed to me. As I learned more about the tool we were using, the problem statement became more clear, and I was able to finish my work in the next three weeks with my mentors’ help.

In the last week, I had to give a presentation on my work and experience, preparing for which was a lot of fun. On the last day, after I finished my presentation, I sent out a thank-you note to my manager and mentor. “Time flies”, he said and I couldn’t agree more. We had one last meeting before I became jobless again.

This internship was an opportunity for me to get answers to the questions I had about my ability to work. Although the amount of development I had to do was too little in comparison to the whole project, I believe that it made a considerable impact on the product. This was also my first time working on something that directly serves people, that’s a different feeling, definitely different from the feeling of developing something for a grade. Overall, I enjoyed the internship more than I thought I would. And I can’t wait to find out what my future holds for me!