Amazon

Casual dress code.

Knowledgeable teammates.

Learned a lot quickly.

Free bananas from the banana stand.

Fantastic pay for an intern.

Find out if you get a return offer on your last day.

Public transportation pass provided.

Some fun intern events, although a lot of them centered around drinking.

Seattle is an unwelcoming city, especially for Amazon employees. I felt like the locals hated Amazon and would blame all of the city's problems on Amazon. You will be noticed for having an Amazon badge, and people will think you are to blame.

Had to stay in a hotel (chosen by Amazon) for a few weeks. The surrounding area had a large homeless population and drug trafficking, and I could hear fighting outside the hotel at night.

University housing didn't have air conditioning and got very hot.

Project felt meaningless; they probably never used anything I did for the project.

Downtown location is loud, smells bad (like weed often times), and has a large homeless population.

A lot of the tools are internal to Amazon and not applicable outside of Amazon.

High-pressure return offer (at least in 2017). They only gave you a couple of weeks to accept, and the likelihood of getting your preferred location and team choice was based on the time to accept. Despite a negative internship experience, I accepted because I didn't have time to consider other opportunities and didn't want to be jobless after graduation. I still don't enjoy working at Amazon and recommend people not to accept the internship offer because they will pressure you into accepting the return offer.

City is hard to get around, even with a public transportation pass provided by Amazon.

I struggled with depression during my internship and didn't feel like I had any way to get help. The company seems apathetic to the well-being of employees and likely would not be supportive of employees they knew were struggling with mental health issues.

Provide more support for interns. You are moving interns from all over the world away from their friends and family to an unfamiliar and unwelcoming city with a lot of problems.

Managers and mentors need to make sure that interns are doing okay personally (ask them how they are doing if they look depressed or appear stressed out), and the company needs to provide support to interns going through a stressful transition.

The company culture is Darwinian, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be concerned about the mental health of your employees.