Summer Musings: Ft. Mentorship and Spontaneous Beach Excursions
Big Tech who?
Sitting on the warm grass in Golden Gardens Park yesterday evening, oohing at fit volleyball beachgoers and larger-than-life sailboats running across the glassy blue water, I couldn’t help but gawk a bit at the surreality of it all. The lopsided birthday cake sitting on the bedsheet-turned-picnic blanket seemed to have similar thoughts, donning an imaginative grin at the peaceful circle of humans. What’s even funnier in this supposedly picturesque scene was that half of these humans were dressed in semi-formal work clothes, sweating in the rare Seattle heat, while their default Amazon backpacks sat comfortably in the back of their car trunks. Talk about STEM majors and Amazon tech employees touching grass LOL.
Most people in my major think that landing a big tech internship at a place like Amazon unlocks some kind of hidden key to life. The glory is blatantly littered across obtrusively silly benchmarks like LinkedIn posts and braggy young adults parading across university like they’re some kind of hot god for landing a prestigious internship. Not that I’m not equally guilty of the former; I’ll admit that LinkedIn posts are incredibly fun to make—especially as the comments fill with “Congrats, [Name]!” Nothing like a dose of self-absorbed delusion, right?
Yet in all seriousness—I can’t help but notice that this summer in Seattle at one of the largest companies in the world has not led to any kind of grand epiphany about prestige, AI, or job security — as much as I anticipated it would with my religious listening of the NYT Hard Fork podcast and its occasional tech-doomsday analysis. Rather, it’s led me to this small but certain realization as I lounged on this random beach, chatting with a team of interns I now call friends and mentors whom I look up to very much — that the key to all of this, of growing as a person and learning as a human—is mentorship. And friendship. It’s giving and taking, taking and giving, and letting the people that you cross paths with seep into your life and priorities, while paving the way for others so that they might have an opportunity to do the same. Gods I sound like some self-righteous preacher.
But that’s what I mean about mentorship, and how important I’ve realized that people—the people you run into everyday, the people that you encounter by accident, the people that you get to know, the people that you stumble by—play such a huge role in who you become.
The internship I’m a part of this summer at Amazon is inextricably intertwined with a program that I’ve been a part of since the summer before college—CS KickStart (CSK), a one-week-long CS program sponsored by the UC Berkeley EECS Department for incoming freshmen girls interesting in computer science. It started with my wide-eyed, pre-frosh-self meeting a CSK Lead Director at a booth during Cal Day—with no clue about what the program’s backstory was or the time and effort that went into putting it together. All I knew was that it was a free program, it was quite fun, and it made Berkeley CS appear absolutely mesmerizing, even after the reality of the school year slowly peeled those rose-tinted glasses away.
CSK was not like one of those resume-building tech and consulting clubs that Berkeley is so stubbornly known for (can you believe that our toxic culture even got featured in one of the top op-eds in the NYT?). It was, put simply, the fruition of months of efforts featuring a group of gals who spent hours of their school year and summer organizing meetings, booking rooms, sending emails, gaming finances, stressing about life and apps and banners and curriculum and hikes and housing and forms and websites and field trips and cafe vouchers and industry talks and pre-made dorm beds— all in an effort to make this one week for incoming freshman girls interested in CS as happy and welcoming as possible—so that they may leave with friends who would last them throughout college; Especially as they slowly, inevitably, became the few gals left in increasingly advanced upper division EECS courses.
KickStart was such a great experience as an attendee that I came back to organize for the next two years, this year in a larger role. Neither myself nor my two fellow lead directors this year would guess that the program, thanks to the impassioned pitch of my co-lead during a conference, would catch the eye of an Amazon executive; Nor that a bit of dialogue with the deans and lead professors at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) would turn an idea into a full-blown internship program open to all CDSS students.
Needless to say, this Amazon executive paved the way for some of us wide-eyed sophomores to experience big tech under tight-knit mentorship and friendship that’s so often lacking in this world—something she described as a way to “give back” amidst all the people in her life who were willing to give to her. And I see this give-and-take everyday at work now: In my little cohort of interns who deal with my everyday yapping, in my mentors (given admittedly little prior notice of our arrival) who continue to take time out of their busy days to help us interns navigate this new corporate life, and in all of the hidden people who work tirelessly behind-the-scenes to invest in our cohort’s wellbeing. It’s the “give” of all these folks who are not just willing to indulge in my everyday questions, mistakes, and proposals to throw birthday beach celebrations at 7pm with little to no context—but to be equally enthusiastic in doing so—that make the experience so, damn, meaningful.
This idea of the “internship,” as far as I’m concerned, becomes so much more powerful when it’s not built on the basis of prestige or posts, but when it becomes valued for passionate, caring people. MCP and AI agents are cool, but the people I’ve gotten to meet, the stories I‘ve come to know, and the memories I’ve gotten to make over hastily-put-together bedsheet blankets on beaches, sneaky Whole Foods cake excursions, and island pickleball— have made everything so much more meaningful. Who cares about parading across college with company merch and brazen arrogance scrawled across smug faces when there’s so much more to cherish in an experience like this?
I suppose this give-and-take does come full-circle: As I continue to “take” with the occasional coding crash outs during work and free Amazon coffees per day, I “give” during the evenings and nights spent with my roommate (the aptly well-spoken conference speaker) and my other warm, bubbly co-lead CSK director—as we continue to book rooms, plan speakers, stress over housing, evaluate applications, and send loads and loads of emails in anticipation of yet another (crossing my fingers for “successful”) CSK—a program only made possible because of the years of “gives” this past decade.
It’s just so incredibly refreshing how these cycles of give-and-take, take-and-give, and the like become so ingrained in our everyday lives; Not to mention how wondrous it is that one person’s “take” can so quickly transform into another person’s “give”—all because of the kindness, mentorship, and friendship that has been afforded to us in each and every step of our lives.
— Omg it’s already 2 am … I need to work tomorrow haha! A huge thank you to OC, ZC, AD, JZ, YS, FJ, AL, and KK for the late-night inspo ❤
