Dropbox

At a previous internship (at another well-known and successful tech company of similar size), I felt discouraged and didn't have very much self-confidence most of the time; my manager was not an engineer, my mentor was working on something different than I was, and in general I felt it was difficult to ask for help.

As a result, even though I enjoyed the environment, I spent a lot of my day feeling like I was drowning and not really understanding how to proceed, or how to learn more in order to proceed.

Working on Android at Dropbox, my mentor gave me a light side project before the internship started (a couple of hours of work every weekend) that helped me get a grasp of how Android development worked, and made me feel a lot more confident about my abilities.

During the actual internship, my mentor arranged weekly 1-on-1's to give feedback, ask me about my concerns, and so on; they were also always available for technical help when I was confused about the right way to do something.

I received formal feedback every two weeks with suggestions like "don't be afraid to ask more questions" or "go over your code before you submit it for review" that didn't feel overwhelming, like "stop being so terrible" or something; it made me feel like I was constantly improving.

People also seemed super-friendly.

At the previous company, I pretty much ate lunch/dinner alone and listened to podcasts or music the entire summer. Sometimes I would try to sit down next to people, but it seemed hard to really strike up a conversation.

At Dropbox, I tried to continue being a loner for a little while, but I kept getting dragged into lunches with my team and so on.

It was surprisingly easy to find people with shared interests with whom I could get into really engaging conversations. One time after dinner, I accidentally ended up playing chess and was repeatedly destroyed over the next hour or so by some ludicrously strong players - that's the kind of thing that ended up happening many times throughout the summer.

It's hard to eliminate personal bias here - maybe I felt incompetent at my previous company because I really was incompetent at that time; maybe people didn't seem as friendly because I didn't make an effort to make friends.

But I do think that there is some difference there. At the very least I can point out the things that I found surprising and enjoyable here, and you, dear reader, can make a decision for yourself.

Things like weekly team lunches where people discuss work, a startup based on nude selfies, Popin Cookin sushi candy, and the correct pronunciation of "char*" (I maintain that it's "care star", as in "character").

Things like team members who will pause whatever they're doing and walk over to help you as soon as you Gchat them with a question.

Those same team members will crowd around one person's desk to try out an Oculus Rift demo late at night, or play FIFA, or reserve a conference room to build a motorized Lego crane during Hack Week.

I felt like people were invested in my success and happiness because they cared about me, not because it was in some way beneficial to their career.

That's kind of the running theme here, you know? I just felt like people cared about me. My mentor cared about me, my team cared about me, the other interns cared about me. And I care about them; there are people at Dropbox I'll miss a lot when I'm gone, something I wasn't able to say about my previous company.

Intern events are really great. The biggest one this summer was whitewater rafting - we all went out to a river and camped there for a weekend.

I felt like sitting in our tents, with no internet connection, waiting for dinnertime and just chatting with the other interns was really relaxing and fun. I look back on that weekend really fondly - it's like an idealized summer camp experience that I never really experienced growing up.

They also gave me a ton of money, but come on, hopefully that's not your main reason for working somewhere. Along similar lines, the food is, of course, really excellent.

Even though I feel like I made several good friends in the short time I've been here, I still felt like it was somewhat difficult to find people that share my interests. This was especially true because my interests seem to be kind of unusual (anime and algorithms, for example). Most people I've met with those interests tend to be young college students like me.

If Dropbox had pushed me to socialize more and earlier, I feel like I could have gotten to know a lot of people well, rather than only really talking with them near the end of the internship and feeling regretful that I couldn't have gotten to know them better.

I think the work was interesting and satisfying, but not as much as my school courses are. Of course, that's my personal opinion, and I think I tend to like puzzle-y school things more than industry in general. Explain to me why Kruskal's runs in log-star time on sorted input and I'm a happy camper.

I suppose my internship project seemed less consequential than, say, an intern project at a startup (where you might have a ton of responsibility). For me, that didn't matter too much, but it seems to matter a lot to other people.

One result of receiving constant feedback was that I always had a target to reach for; I was always trying to improve. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it made me feel a little anxious most of the time. There isn't a point where you're told, "Okay, you're good enough, just keep doing what you're doing." Constantly pushing myself to be better felt, at times, a little exhausting.

Overall, I feel like there weren't many obvious/significant problems with Dropbox. The only things I could count against it are the things I don't even know about yet - only things that I suspect could be better, but am not sure about.

Is there any company that really rocks at having interns make a lot of friends? Is there really an internship that lets me just solve puzzles all day, or do I need a Ph.D. for that kind of thing? It's hard to tell, since I don't have a wealth of experience at different companies.