Interning at Bloomberg (Summer 2022)

This past summer, I had the privilege and pleasure to be a software engineer intern at Bloomberg. Specifically, I was on the Bloomberg Law (BLAW) Platform Enablement team, working on integrating an authorization service, API gateway, and BLAW’s Draft Analyzer API using Ruby on Rails. Due to NDA reasons, I can’t really elaborate more on my project, but what I can talk about is my experience as an intern and how my summer in New York City went!

The intern experience

For some reason, my expectation going into my first internship was that I’d sit at my desk in the Bloomberg office and code for 8 hours a day. This could not be farther from reality (and I’m very grateful that it wasn’t). Of course, I still had work to do in the form of my project, but there were intern events every week to keep things fresh and exciting. I loved that there was a variety of things to do, whether it was Tuesday Tech Talks, intern TED talks, boba-making, partying at the Loeb Boathouse (which sadly is closing down), sight-seeing at the Edge, training sessions (for topics ranging from personal security to Kafka to finance), team lunches, a Yankees baseball game, a broadway show (The Lion King), data center tours, tours of Bloomberg’s Princeton office, and my favorite, the intern puzzle hunt. Suffice it to say, I was never bored during my internship and it was really fun.

Another thing I didn’t realize was how long it would take for me to actually start on my intern project. For some reason, I thought that I’d be working on day 1. However, interns spent about 1.5 weeks in a training course. We were put in 1 of 2 cohorts and spent the entire course together, which I appreciated because it gave me a chance to meet other interns and make friends. I’m also glad that the training was so in-depth because otherwise I would’ve been very lost in terms of Bloomberg’s tech stack and internal tools. It also gave me a chance to see what it was like at a Bloomberg office different from my own (there are 3 offices in NYC)!

After the intern training, I spent the next week or so onboarding onto my specific team. Once again, this was a great chance for me to get acquainted to how my team worked (e.g. daily standups), the office I’d be working in for the rest of the summer, and the tech stack.

I spent the rest of the summer working on my project and attending various intern events. My mentor and manager were very supportive of me, whether it was encouraging me to go to intern events, take breaks, or answering the many questions I had.

Summer in NYC

Another cool thing about interning at Bloomberg last summer was that it was the first time I was living on my own for an extended period of time. For instance, in the week between finals and the start of the internship, my mom taught me how to cook very basic dishes.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to be an amazing cook. Interning at a big tech company had the advantage of things like free lunch at the office and corporate housing (or a housing stipend). I took the corporate housing option, which was a single bedroom, communal bathroom, and communal kitchen at the 92Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. After my parents helped me move in, I did feel a bit homesick the first week. Additionally, because I didn’t have any roommates to keep me accountable, I messed up my sleep schedule slightly. However, I soon adjusted to the 9 to 5 lifestyle as well as cooking my own dinner.

As a high school student, I used to dream about graduating college and starting work so that I no longer had to do homework after a long day. However, I realized that adulting is not that different in terms of how much you spend doing “work” versus “play” — it’s just that the tasks you have to do change. You might not have to take classes or do homework, but now you have to commute, go to work, commute back, make meals, do laundry, go grocery shopping, etc. That said, I was definitely less stressed and had more free time over the summer than during the school year.

However, there was an upside to living on my own (and in a single room): more independence. I could spend my free time however I wanted. I did many tourist-y things in New York (sometimes on my own, sometimes with other interns, once with my roommates from freshman year when they visited, and once with my brother when he visited) or stayed home the whole weekend to binge watch season 4 of Stranger Things (hence my very detailed review of it).

It also helped that many other UC Berkeley students were in New York that summer for their own summer internships. For example, many other Codebase members were in NYC so I was able to grab dinner and boba with them.

Overall, I’m very grateful for the chance to live and work in New York. It truly is a unique city — there’s so many people, things to do, places to see, and food to try. At times it felt a bit overstimulating for an introvert such as myself, but regardless, I really enjoyed meeting everyone and working on my intern project.

Thank yous

My experience interning at Bloomberg would not have happened without the support of countless people. Thank you to:

• My brother for giving me recruiting advice and believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself
• My parents for supporting me through the move in, move out, and signing paperwork process
• My professional development mentor at Codebase, Parth, for doing a mock technical interview to help me prepare
• My friend Jyoti for sending me this opportunity in the first place
• My recruiter Brittany for helping me throughout the process
• My mentor Steve for answering my questions and guiding me through the project
• My manager Partha for encouraging me to do intern things and take care of myself, not just work all the time
• The many intern friends I made at Bloomberg, especially one person who I still talk to today, who is the reason why I had so much fun last summer

Originally published at https://phrdang.github.io on February 18, 2023.