Name: Triet P
School: University of Alberta
Role: Software engineering intern
Team: WhatsApp business integrity, actor pillar, enforcement team
Meta office location: Menlo Park

I was previously a medical student in Vietnam before realizing that it wasn't the path for me. During my time in medicine, I often saw people on the worst days of their lives and it was an overall draining environment. After three years, I decided I needed a change. I had a huge passion for math and enjoyed solving puzzles or logic problems, which aligned greatly to computer science. What I love the most is the beauty of clean code. The creativity in designing every problem differently to make it readable, scalable and easy to understand is simply a masterpiece.

I realized that no matter how many self projects I did or how much effort I put in, I wasn’t going to learn how to handle larger scalability problems on my own. I needed to be part of something way bigger than myself, and an internship was an obvious choice. Recruiting at Meta was a very unique and surprising experience, especially as someone who switched career paths and had a challenging time attracting large companies.

Meta doesn’t just evaluate your experience. They look into your story, your passion, your willingness to learn. I knew that my resume in computer science wasn’t that great, since I had no “official” experience in software engineering (as a result of switching majors), but my first recruiter still believed in me and gave me the chance to prove myself. I can confidently say that she changed the trajectory of my life and no words can explain how grateful I am that she believed in me throughout the whole process.

This is my first internship and it is a big company. I was nervous before I started, but once I got here, things weren’t as stressful as I imagined. Since my first day, everyone has been so nice and my team gave me a warm welcome. I also can not speak highly enough of my manager, and I consider myself very lucky to work with him. He has always been very caring and supportive. Whenever I have some refactor ideas, even to refactor a design of someone more senior’s code, he always listens with respect and encourages me to implement them. He even went out of his way to set up recurring meetings to help me improve my document writing skills. When he reviews my writing, his feedback is more detailed than any of my literature assignments from school.

The internship so far has been good for me and I have learned a lot of new things. I’ve been able to apply almost every single bit of knowledge I have in computer science, as well as build great rapport with my manager and peers on my team. I don't know what lies in the future, but one thing I know for sure is that I am really enjoying myself right now and that’s all I care about.