First Software Engineer Internship — Mastercard
A short story about acquiring, completing, and reaping the rewards of my first software engineering internship at Mastercard.
It’s early May and the clock is ticking with internship opportunities for college students. I was finishing up my junior year in Brooklyn College’s computer science program and was still having trouble getting a real software engineer internship for the last year. Over the time I was struggling to get the role, I managed to get a quality assurance internship where I did a bit of web development using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This internship paired with the hackathons and personal projects I did may have helped because on May 1st, I received an offer for my first software engineering internship from Mastercard.
Excitement is an understatement about how I felt when I received the call from the recruiter I was working with. Things were finally going my way and I felt such a sigh of relief. But then I found out this internship would be in O’Fallon, Missouri, the Mastercard headquarters. Now I’m not gonna say I was scared, but that news was shocking to hear. I’m from Brooklyn, born and raised. I went to Brooklyn College, Brooklyn Tech, and even a popular Brooklyn middle school. Having never lived outside of Brooklyn for an extended period, I had no idea what to expect. If anything, you might say I had low expectations because I imagined deep south deserted farmland when I thought of Missouri.
The actual internship was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I started speaking with people in the same intern cohort before arriving early on. Not only did I need to find a roommate for the summer, but I also wanted to have a couple of friends I could connect with when I got to Missouri. I managed to form a little crew with my guy Washington from Philly and my gal Jetnya from Chicago. I can only imagine what people thought when they saw our chocolate trio roaming the streets of O’Fallon, Missouri during our free time.
Anyways…with this internship being my first real software engineering internship, you can imagine I may have struggled through it. Admittedly I did at first. I was on a team that was nested in the data warehouse for Mastercard. With this team, I got my special intern project, the PanBinVal API. From a high-level perspective, the project was basically to build an API that clients could use to validate card numbers. P.A.N. stands for primary account number, B.I.N. stands for bank identification number, and val was just short for validation. In order to solve this problem, I had the opportunity to learn about SpringBoot for the API framework, Jenkins pipelines for continuous integration/continuous deployment, and Luhn’s algorithm to validate the card number. In addition to my PanBinVal project, I also contributed to a few other projects inside and outside my team. Check out this public slideshow that I presented to engineers and leaders at Mastercard with all the details of my internship contributions.
Not only did I get to make an impact at Mastercard, but I also had the opportunity to network with some really smart people. I remember I even went to this meetup outside of work hours to learn more about some technologies that we happened to use at Mastercard. Check out this picture below of me and a few of my mentors at this meetup about Spring and server-less functions.
Upon completion of my first software engineering internship with Mastercard, I felt vindicated. My parents always wanted me to get into the medical industry, but without any true plan. I knew technology was the place for me and I needed to figure out a way to sustain myself doing it. Completing the internship was a litmus test for my parents of my earning potential and to myself of what I could accomplish if I put my mind to a problem.
Mastercard extended me a return offer to work full time as a software engineer in their San Francisco office. While this was very exciting, I wanted to explore other opportunities that started to arise with Mastercard on my resume. I started interviewing hard at sooooooooo many companies. I probably faced 20+ rejections after an interview, but I was able to muster out at least 4 full-time software engineer job offers to start my career with. In the end, I decided to go with Etsy for my first full time role out of college. You can read about my experience at Etsy in this blog post.
This internship opportunity with Mastercard truly changed the trajectory of my career. I met great people, worked with interesting technologies, and got out of my comfort zone for the first time in my life. This is why to this day I’m a huge advocate for software engineer internships. If you’re a college student or a bootcamp graduate, getting a software engineer internship/fellowship is so useful in setting up the rest of your career. You might be thinking, “Hey Chuma, I’m in the same predicament you were in with acquiring that first software engineering internship. I haven’t been as fortunate as you”. Well you’re in luck! When I finally broke through the tech industry door, I started putting other people on. If you’re having trouble, you can book a 1 on 1 career coaching session with me. Not only can I review your resume from a professional software engineer’s point of view (with experience at Amazon, Mastercard, Etsy, and more), but I can also talk through your experience and give my analysis on the next steps you should take. Now if you’re shy, you can just visit my youtube and check out some career coaching sessions I did with other folks.
That’s all for now folks! While you’re here, follow me and check out some of my other articles if you enjoyed this one. And if you know someone that might benefit from this content, please share the link with them. Bless them and you’ll get blessed back for sure. Thanks a ton for reading!
Links
- Book your virtual 1 on 1 — https://calendly.com/chumomega/1-on-1
- Past career coaching sessions — https://www.youtube.com/@chumomega
- My Etsy experience — https://medium.com/@chumomega/2-years-engineering-etsy-fd9fa56f8182
