Life Update (February 2021)

Got some great and not so great news lately I wanted to share so I’ll just get right into it.

I got an internship for the summer at Amazon!

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve most likely seen me share through the month of January that I was preparing for an interview. This interview was for a software development internship at Amazon and well, I got the job! I kept it quiet for about a month in order to hash out the details and make some arrangements, but I can now safely say I have accepted the offer and will be working there this summer. Working at a FAANG company was my goal for the last internship of my degree so needless to say I was VERY pleased when I got the offer. Get ready because blog posts on my experience interviewing with the company, tips on preparing for the interviews and of course on my experience as an intern at the company are on their way!

I’m moving to Vancouver

Well, temporarily. The offer from Amazon is for their Vancouver office. With the pandemic, the company offers the option of doing the internship remote or in a hybrid mode, which means you’ll work remotely some days and at the office other days. I think a valuable part of an internship is connecting with new people and getting to know a company’s culture, and those things are hard to do remotely. Hence, I decided to choose the hybrid mode for my internship, which means I’ll be moving to Vancouver for the summer. I’ve never lived on the West Coast, so I’m pumped to discover British Columbia and all it has to offer, especially in the summer. Also, I’m in much need of change and adventure thanks to the lovely pandemic, so this could no come at a better time. I can’t wait to bring you guys along my process of finding a place and exploring the city and its surroundings!

I deferred the start of my fourth year

But thankfully not my graduation date. In my sequence at the University of Waterloo, I was registered to take a school term this summer, complete my last coop term in the fall and go back to school for one last term before graduating in May 2022. I applied to the Amazon summer internship position thinking I could push back my internship to the fall. However, when I got the offer, the recruitment team made is clear the offer was only for summer and if I wanted an internship for the fall, I needed to go through the whole interview process again. Unfortunately, the school term I am supposed to take this summer is not offered at any other time in the year. Since I had a job offer lined up for the summer, I worked with my program and coop advising teams to make it possible for me to take some of the frouth year courses in the fall and hence not deferring my graduation by a year. The conclusion is, I will be starting my fourth year of computer engineering in the fall instead of this summer and graduating next winter as planned!

Took a break from the blog, but I’m back at it

I have been in a creative funk since the start of the year and have found it hard to sit down and write a blog post I was proud of. My creative juices have recently started to flow again, and I feel like I am in a good place to start writing again. The blog is now almost a year old, and while I think pushing myself to create a blog post per week was a great way to start off the blog, I was beginning to see writing the posts as a chore and I wasn’t as proud of the content I was creating. I will be publishing blog posts at an irregular frequency from now on so make sure to follow my Instagram (@mmmheir) to get notified whenever a one is out!

I was quarantined for the past 2 weeks

Someone close to me caught the virus so I had to quarantine myself for 2 weeks. I thankfully tested negative, but consider this a reminder to keep being careful and get tested as soon as you get (even mild) symptoms or are in contact with someone that tested positive.