From Student to Intern
I sent my online application for an 8-month software engineering internship at Red Hat in late 2021. I wasn’t waiting long, and under a fortnight later I missed a call from an unknown number. I was in the library at the time and thinking it was most likely a scam call, I declined. It clicked with me fairly fast that it could be about the internship so I ran outside to call back. Patrik Sulek from Talent Acquisition answered and we scheduled a follow-up phone screening for Monday morning.
I was fairly nervous, but the call went well. We chatted for ten minutes about what I was looking for in an internship, what areas I was interested in, and why I chose Red Hat. A couple of days after the screening, Patrik contacted me requesting to schedule an interview! I was ecstatic.
Having three interviewers scared me quite a bit, but Brendan, Paul, and Leigh were all very relaxed and casual when I joined the call. This definitely rubbed off on me. I was asked the typical first question — tell us about yourself. I had prepared for this and I had lots to say. Once I got talking the nerves went away and the rest of the interview went brilliantly! I was happy leaving the call and felt I had done everything I could to secure the internship.
I received a call just over a week later and was told I got the job!
I started on January 10th 2022. I got the royal tour of the office from Brendan by the end of the first week. This was my first day in the office and I was very impressed. My work experience thus far consisted of solely retail settings, where the only things complimentary were headaches and tap water. The Herman Miller chairs, standing desks and pool table all screamed that this was a nice place to work, and the staff were well looked after. I’d come to learn over the next eight months that my assumptions were spot on.
My first few weeks on the Red Hat OpenShift API Management team involved onboarding, learning Git, and attending meetings where each one introduced a plethora of new acronyms. There was a steep learning curve but I enjoyed the challenge and the team was more than happy to help with any issues that arose.
The next couple of months were filled with workshops, LinkedIn Learning courses, pair programming, and imposter syndrome. My mentor, Laura Fitzgerald, was brilliant at answering questions and helping me when needed, but she didn’t spoon-feed me. When I was starting a good-first-issue ticket, she would often give me hints on what I should be doing instead of just telling me how to do it. This was frustrating at times as I felt like I would never figure some things out but I learned so much more in the process! I was never good at asking questions in College and this method of teaching really forced me to break out of that habit.
After about eleven or twelve weeks into the internship, I began to pick my own work. The tickets were generally small but they covered a range of different topics so I got to learn a lot quickly. It wasn’t long before I started to take on some more challenging work. I put a lot of pressure on myself in the beginning. When a ticket was taking longer than I had hoped, I felt as though I would be judged. Giving an update on the standup, I thought people might think “He’s still doing that ticket? ah jaysus”. This was definitely not the case. As the months went on, I learned that — especially in the beginning — my goal should not be to be as productive as possible, or progress the fastest, but to learn as much as I can. After all, that is the whole point of an internship!
The next few months of my internship flew by. I got to work on loads of interesting tickets and broaden my skill set. I am still as bad at pool as I was in the beginning though. On various occasions, I ended up on calls discussing certain pieces of work with the team leads, senior engineers and engineers from other teams. My instinctual reaction was to feel out of place as an intern with all of these extremely experienced engineers but never once did I feel like my voice wouldn’t be heard or my opinion wouldn’t be considered. Red Hatters are great at making everyone feel included.
I am writing this with about a month left, and the last seven months have gone by in a blink. If this time last year, you had told me I would be functioning as a fully-fledged engineer by the end of my internship I would not have believed you. I’ve learned more than I ever thought I would, and that can be largely attributed to the amazing people at Red Hat. From my teammates and mentor to the faces I see in the office every now and then — everyone has been so helpful and kind.
My original plan for this blog was actually to give future interns some insight into what I’ve learned, and to spread some knowledge on what I would have liked to know in the beginning, but I got a bit carried away talking about my experience. Maybe that would be a good topic for a follow-up blog :)
Thank you to Red Hat and Red Hatters for being a huge part of my journey, it’s been a blast!
