Human Interest's first engineering internship program was a success!

Do you remember your first internship experience? When thinking about internships, I often reflect on my first internship at Starsight Telecast, a set-top box company. I remember learning so much about how real embedded systems software works in that industry. My mentor there provided me a challenging opportunity and supported me with guidance along the way. It was a satisfying experience where I learned and was able to help their business along the way.

Fast forward a few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to guide and mentor several generations of interns in former roles and companies. Each time, I find it an exhilarating experience to work with these newly charged students that are eager to gain their first experiences in a new frontier. For them it’s an exciting opportunity to make a difference, build connections and learn new things. For me, I truly enjoy mentoring and guiding them throughout their summer journey and capturing some of their enthusiasm and excitement along the way. On many occasions I’ve been fortunate to continue my connections with these talented individuals much beyond their internships and well into their professional careers.

As I reflect on the current year and my new role at Human Interest, I’m so thankful that we were able to complete the company’s first ever engineering summer internship program! We couldn’t be more thrilled with the notable outcome of the projects and development that our amazing 8 interns from 美国加州大学伯克利分校 美国加州大学戴维斯分校 , and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute tackled.

Startup life is incredibly busy and challenging, but also amazingly rewarding to see our fast paced and steady progress. In engineering, our roadmap includes numerous enhancements to improve the customer experience of our financial platform so that our customers can save and better access their retirement. Building an internship program at a startup is hard. There is always more to do than we can handle, and it is very easy to say "now is not a good time."

Engineering was indeed at a crossroads. Should we continue to think quarter by quarter about our hiring goals and remain completely focussed on our deliverables? Or should we begin to invest in a quality college internship program at the expense of engineering time to plan and mentor the program? We chose to do the latter because we know it will never be the perfect time, but it really matters, and we need to learn to be good at running an internship program.

Our software engineering interns partnered with each other and their mentors to take forward projects that included customer-facing experiences, backend financial services, data management, and operational tools. Two projects went into production and the rest are planned to go live when their corresponding features ship next year!

The valuable feedback we received from our interns validated the mindfulness of the curated projects our engineering team created, the support and insights provided by the mentors, and the high-touch experience the people team provided during the hiring and onboarding process.

What the interns learned

• Knowledge about the Fintech industry
• New tools: Github, Jira, Docker, Retool
• New languages: Javascript, Typescript
• Writing clean code to be deployed into production
• Gaining lifestyle insight of a software engineer
• Working in a fast paced startup environment
• Testing

What the interns enjoyed

• Fun activities and team bonding are planned each week
• Company and team onboarding
• Collaboration with mentors and learning from experienced developers
• Pair programming throughout the project process
• Responsiveness, support, and feedback from the mentors
• Snacks!

What we learned

• Our engineers have amazing coaching and mentoring skills that can be further refined when practiced on engineers early in their career.
• Our internship program touched people and organizations outside of engineering, requiring their bandwidth and expertise, but also providing a positive and engaging outlet for them.
• Our intern showcase event was better that expected. It provided a unique opportunity for a large group of product, engineering and operations team members to discuss what was completed but also imagine future possibilities…

“I’m so grateful for all the opportunities to speak with you about my career goals and receive personalized feedback throughout my internship. I know I’ve become a much stronger programmer and team-oriented worker this summer thanks to you and Tim. I’ll miss all our weekly team lunches at HQ -- especially that one dry pot place you showed us. I hope the next time we're all in town we can bring them back one more time!” - Andrew Tran , 2022 Intern from 美国加州大学伯克利分校

"We're here to solve America's retirement crisis. Succeeding at this mission requires a technology-first approach, and that is what sets us apart from other 401(k) providers. Building good software starts with having a talented team, and? I'm delighted to see the impact our first cohort of interns has had on our product." - Abhi Mishra, CTO of Human Interest ?

We congratulate our first intern class and wish them success as they continue their academic journey. Human Interest is looking forward to hosting many more successful internship programs, learning and improving with each iteration.

Anthony Lu , Christian Abueg , Joshua Ge , Rubin Luitel , Manh Khang Nguyen , Andrew Tran , David Finck , Jonathan Sun

We are always looking for amazing engineers with strong technical and collaboration skills. You’ll be helping to deliver features and platform technology for our amazing retirement platform and helping to mentor our next internship program!

Check out our open positions and upcoming intern opportunities on www.humaninterest.com/careers

Reach out to me if you are interested in engineering roles listed above and are a direct candidate.

#techjobs #distributedsystems #innovators #jobalert #financetechnology #followthebeacon?