I guess I loved it so much, I came twice!
I was very fortunate to return to Apple this summer as a software engineer intern on the Apple Store Apps team! My broader team works on the user-facing side of retail engineering, spanning apple.com, the Apple Store app, and other software supporting retail storefronts.
Many of my friends have known that I’ve loved building useful and pretty things ever since I learned what frontend engineering was, and being able to try out this team was a dream come true. After working on websites last summer — which is what most of my previous experience had been — I wanted to try working on an app. I had taken TAC 342 (previous ITP 342) at USC, where I had learned about Swift and SwiftUI, so I felt very prepared to take on a new challenge at a familiar company.
Despite this familiarity, I still had plenty of things I learned.
1. Play the intern card to the maximum.
You’re still learning about the company! Ask endless questions about things you don’t know and schedule those coffee chats with anyone from your peers to your leadership. My director was more than willing to spend 30 minutes with me on a really busy day to hear about who I was as a person and what brought me to Apple. We bring a fresh perspective to a storied company, which is particularly relevant in this day and age where everything is changing quickly due to AI.
2. Break things safely, but know when and who to ask for help.
I made a pull request one day at 5 p.m. when practically everyone had left for the day, thinking, “It’s fine, I’ve done it before and my teammates have walked me through it before.” I accidentally pushed my code to the team’s repository instead of my own, and I jumped in to fix the problem. But no matter what I did, nothing was reflected online! (I thought I was so ready to become the intern meme.)
I asked one of my teammates who was still in the office what I could’ve done wrong, walking him through the steps I did. We went through some sanity checks and found out that GitHub was down that day (lol) but I wouldn’t have discovered that unless we had walked through my problem together. I will never forget the pull request flow again, so I’m glad I (temporarily) broke things, but knowing when I was out of my skillset and being able to describe my problem to someone who knew how to fix it ended up being very valuable.
3. Don’t be afraid to act like a full-time employee!
Obviously, this is within reason. This also fits nicely with the first point!
I got an inside look into the full-time employee experience: suggesting features, filing and fixing bugs, and participating in a lot of meetings. When it came time to my project, I was initially very anxious about getting permission from my mentor and other teammates on things I should or shouldn’t do. What I came to realize was that as long as I could justify my technical decisions and I was following best practices, they didn’t care how I implemented it. Sometimes I’d add in my own hidden features that I felt complemented my development environment or made the process easier, which will also be helpful when someone else picks up my project.
I scheduled meetings with my manager on my own whenever I felt appropriate, talked to project managers who had vast high-level knowledge about the direction of the team, and also messaged other people at Apple who either created the frameworks I worked on or had other knowledge about my project’s components!
I also made sure that I wasn’t always sacrificing my own time to bend to others — there’s almost always a good compromise to a reasonable meeting time for all of your calendar events! This probably makes more sense if you’ve ever been in a corporate environment, but just because you’re an intern doesn’t mean that you have to take a 1:1 meeting during your lunch hour; reschedule it to another time of day when you’re both free and go network with other interns! There’s value in that, but it can’t be replicated during a lot of other times.
I honestly got a little emotionally attached to my team and I was so sad to leave! But fingers crossed for the opportunity to return to my team after graduation 🤞
