Making it there

Bagging an Amazon internship is simple. Get through the online round and two technical rounds. Pretty straightforward right? Well, let me go into the details:

1. Online Round: There were around 20 MCQs and 3 coding questions. Make sure you give importance to the MCQs as well, as my friend who solved 2 coding questions did not get through whereas I who had solved only 1 did make to the next round presumably because of my MCQ performance. It was basic CS stuff, nothing too fancy.

2. Technical Rounds: There were two technical rounds. Okay, so make sure you study geeksforgeeks. It’s really that simple. Amazon doesn’t ask you fancy questions with complicated algorithms, they ask you straightforward Data Structures and Algorithms, but they ask for complete implementation. They especially look for corner cases and null checks. All code is checked by them and they can see loopholes in your code quite instantly. After the base question they ask if there’s any improvement that we can do to improve space or time complexity. In the second round they asked me another technical question (again slightly modified from geeksforgeeks) and asked me questions about my resume. Make sure you know your resume because they rigorously analyze it ask you about it.

So that’s pretty much all there is to scoring an Amazon Internship, CG really has no relevance and is not a major criteria.

Life At Amazon

The first week of Amazon went into getting used to the work culture and orientations. Work culture at amazon is unique, There are no fixed timings for when you want to come in. Extremely flexible. In fact from my what I know, there is no record of how much time we are spending in office or logged on. I worked as much as I needed to on different days. Some days I worked from 10am - 12am. Some days i came at 12pm and left at 5pm. They don’t measure how much time you’ve spent at office but rather how much progress you’ve made. Having said this, I’ve gotta say that there is a ton of work at Amazon.

I was assigned to the FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) Inventory Experience Team. This team caters to warehouse operations and the cool thing about Amazon is that the work we do impacts not only India but can be used by anyone in the World. At Amazon, I never felt like an Intern. The work they gave was pretty much as much as a full-fledged employee would have to do. My project was about creating a User Interface for a new validation that Amazon wanted to implement in their warehouses. So I had to create front-end, back-end and Service integrations for my UI along with coordinating with the product manager regarding the design and utility of the UI and coordinating with other services that my UI needs to use. I, myself have never done any front-end coding and hence it took me the first week and a half just to get the basic UI frame up and running (had to learn JS, Spring MVC Framework, Html, CSS, etc). After that most of the work was researching a ton of stuff and then implementing it. The whole backend was written in Java.

I did work a lot, but we had a ton of fun too. My whole team was extremely friendly and we had our quarterly outing at a resort! In our office there’s pool, table-tennis, carroms, foosball. A couple of other interns and I used to play pool everyday in the evening. My internship was at Bangalore which had beautiful weather but horrific traffic. Now when i say horrific I mean it. I’ve never experienced such horrible traffic, haha. But it doesn’t really matter, you kind of get used to it after a while. Every weekend I used to go somewhere or the other, sometimes with the other interns, sometimes with my friends from Roorkee interning here as well, and sometimes with my team! There was never a dull moment in my time here. Work was exciting, I was learning how to write clean and concise code and learning a bunch of new things. My peers always gave me helpful tips and helped me out when I was in a bind.

Summing Up!

My internship at Amazon has taught me a ton of things. First and foremost, make sure you make the most of your college days, because they are extremely precious and we can’t get them back. Secondly, life here is not as monotonous as I thought working at a corporate company would be, working at Amazon was a pleasure! And last but not least, Bangalore is a joy to be in, with a ton of exciting things to do! (Except for the traffic. I hate the traffic. And trust me, you will too).