Amazon

Massive real-world scale: You ship features that instantly serve millions of customers—a priceless experience for any new grad.

Ownership culture: Even as an intern, I was trusted to design, implement, test, and operate my service end-to-end—a great confidence-builder.

Mentorship & feedback loops: Weekly 1-on-1s with my manager and a dedicated intern mentor kept me unblocked and constantly improving.

Top-tier tooling & learning resources: Internal docs, builder tools, and recorded tech talks made ramp-up surprisingly smooth.

Comp & perks: Competitive pay, a relocation stipend, housing allowance, and intern-only events (tech summits, Amazon Future Engineer Day) added huge value.

On-call shadowing can be intense: Pager alerts at odd hours—even as “shadow”—made it hard to fully disconnect some evenings.

Steep learning curve: The AWS ecosystem & internal processes felt overwhelming the first few weeks; expect to drink from a firehose.

Team experience varies: Your summer can differ wildly based on the org; some teams ship production code, while others focus on proof-of-concepts.

Documentation gaps: Older services still lack up-to-date runbooks, so tribal knowledge is real.