Andrew Thomas, a Development Master in Information Technology’s Digital Corps, has successfully leveraged his recent internship position with Amazon into a full-time position with the company in Austin, Texas. Andrew explains:

“My recent internship with Amazon was a huge success. My favorite part was their “ownership” culture—i.e., whatever you’re working on, you own. For me, I was tasked with creating a microservice that would decrease the mean time to resolution of tickets regarding fulfillment centers networking technology. Owning this project involved collecting requirements from customers, designing the service, building a continuous deployment pipeline, creating the service, and setting up metrics so it could be monitored and maintained. I was even able to get it through a security review and running in production, something that most interns don’t get the chance to do.

I participated in code reviews and sprint planning. My coworkers were extremely talented, some had PhDs, others had 10+ years of experience, and they didn’t hold back when critiquing my code, forcing it to be the highest quality. However, I was also able to critique and review their code, helping to catch a few bugs before their code made it to production. This taught me a ton about how to be a better developer and how to write crisp, clean, code. Sprint planning taught me more about Agile development and I got to see first-hand how large-scale projects were managed and created. I helped estimate how long tasks should take and groomed/prioritized a backlog based on customer requirements.”

Once again, Andrew credits the Digital Corps with providing him the skills and confidence to obtain this position at Amazon.

“The Digital Corps has played a big role in my success. I had the real-world development skills to start making an impact early on in my internship while others were still learning what development looked like outside of a university setting. The Corps also gave me experience receiving and giving feedback, which made it easier to work with my team. While the tools and languages I used at Amazon were different, understanding how things are built made learning these new technologies easier.”

Congratulations to Andrew on his new position. We’re looking forward to great things from him!