InternCon is here
Witness the beginning of the intern revolution
Welcome back to another edition of the intern.club 🗞📩. We’re coming to you a bit earlier this week because so much is happening and we didn’t want you to miss out!
This week, we ran a quick poll in our community on which school most members go to. The resounding answer:
InternCon 2020
Last week, we announced InternCon 2020 to our community—the response has been nothing short of miraculous. More than 1,000 people have already signed up to attend and we’ve gotten great responses from new and old speakers.
Stay updated at internconference.com.
Some new additions to our speaker lineup include
Jenny Wen, designer at Figma
Soundarya B, APM at Salesforce
Luba Yudasina, ex-PM & Chief of Staff at Airbnb
Julie Chen, Investor at Bessemer Venture Partners
We are also hosting After:Dark 🌃, the official InternCon after party. After: Dark will feature us hosting virtual concerts and plenty of socializing events to keep you busy all night long.
Additionally, we’re still looking for more folks to participate in our Pitch Competition. If you want to pitch your startup to investors at Contrary, Pear, and Dorm Room Fund, sign up for a Startup Pass.
Finally, we are offering an interesting opportunity for our newsletter audience: if you’d like to moderate a panel at InternCon, reply to this email with your name and which event you’re most interested in. We will get back to you about possibly moderating a conversation!
Big thanks to our sponsor Public for supporting interns and InternCon.
Sign up for Public using the InternCon link to get a slice of stock in your favorite companies and DM @katiep on Public to get this awesome hat that you can rep at InternCon! 👇
Intern Week
Next week, in celebration of National Intern Day, we will be hosting Intern Week. This means special Intern Club events every single day including workshops with Notion, AMAs with top-tier VCs, career tips with Product Marketing Managers, and much more for our designers, consultants, and data scientists.
Make sure to get a VIP pass for InternCon to be invited to those first.
Events
Before Intern Week starts, we’ll still be hosting our suite of Club events (with fun new additions). Here’s a snippet:
🧱 You Are (Not) a PM - Casual, open-mic sessions to build product intuition - RSVP
👩🏽💻 Hackathon Roundtable - Talk shop all things hackathon with event experts - RSVP
⌨️ Technical Bootcamp #4 - Learn how the interviewers’ code - RSVP
🏡 Town Hall - Meet Club leaders and voice your feedback - RSVP
👩🏻🎨 UX Roast - Hang out with other designers and roast some designs - RSVP
Check out the full list here.
Opportunities
Intern.club is expanding and looking to bring in students as we grow and continue to bring joy to students worldwide. We are looking for help with engineering, designing, marketing, and writing during the Fall. Paid opportunity, flexible hours, and not to mention a chance to massively grow your network—why wouldn’t you apply?
Apply here.
Open Water VC - Open Water VC is opening applications for the Fall
Startup Shadowing @ Soma Capital - Apply by July 24th
Civic Digital Fellowship - Fall internship to build a better society
Full Stack Engineer @ Lips - Build a more inclusive internet
Additionally, we’re also helping Slack with a survey to better understand how students find internships—fill that out if you’d like to let them know what you think!
intern.spotlight
Today we are talking to Caitlin Stanton, a current Hardware Engineer Intern at Lyft Level 5.
👋 Hi Caitlin, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I'm a recent graduate of Cornell University with a degree in electrical and computer engineering, as well as double minor in business and CS. I'll be heading back in the fall for a Masters of Engineering degree in ECE as well, this time with a focus on robotics and embedded systems. Though I'm deeply embedded in the tech world now, that wasn't always where I saw myself. Before I got my start in tech through Girls Who Code as a summer immersion participant back in high school, I actually wanted to be an architect and design buildings in New York City (my hometown). After being exposed to the power of technology—both software and hardware—I've dedicated myself to learning and trying to make a positive impact in the world, which is why I'm a driven advocate and public speaker around diversity in STEM and equity in education.
Big change going from architecture to computer engineering. Is that what you’re doing this summer?
This summer I'm a hardware engineering intern at Lyft Level 5, and I've previously interned at Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Girls Who Code.
Level 5 is Lyft's self-driving car division 🚕, and I'm specifically part of the Hardware Compute team. We focus on the central computer that takes sensor data from cameras, LiDAR, and radar and analyzes their outputs in order to provide information for the car to make decisions. My project is focused on researching neural network accelerator chips to streamline this analysis and ensure high accuracy image detection and segmentation in a low power solution. One part of this means looking into current products on the market and meeting with companies to understand more about the performance and architecture of their chips, and the other part is benchmarking neural network models onto a development board.
In my free time, I've been: mentoring two teams for the CodeLabs internship program; co-hosting the Byte of Tech podcast; developing amigoal, an iOS app for collaborative goal tracking; launching speakIT, a platform to amplify BIPOC voices in public speaking; acting as Writing Director for Quantum Girl Magazine; and handling my own public speaking engagements.
Outside of Cornell I'm active in the BUILT BY GIRLS, Girls Who Code, and Girl Genius communities. I also personally enjoy speaking with and mentoring womxn in STEM—I get to meet a lot of new people and learn from all of them!
Wowza, that is a lot of stuff to manage. Any advice for students on how they should manage their similarly busy lives?
It's taken me a long time to understand that success isn't linear, especially when you're constantly seeing "accomplishments" on social media. My biggest piece of advice would be to embrace and normalize your failures! There is nobody on this earth who hasn't made a misstep in their life, especially people who are successful on paper. Understand that you will fail and instead of focusing on the negative and wallowing in your doubt or pain, turn it on its head and make it into a growth opportunity. Talk with your friends, family, and colleagues and create a culture of understanding and support.
😅 Great point. We could write a good-sized book about all our collective failures. How have you been enjoying this summer with intern.club?
I joined intern.club at the start of this summer and have gained so much from it! Especially with everything being virtual, chatting with people in the Slack has given me a whole new level of social interaction. I've met people with vastly different interests and backgrounds, whose networks wouldn't have crossed paths with mine were it not for intern.club. I mean, hey, I wouldn't have become a co-host for Byte of Tech were it not for seeing the opportunity posted!
Thanks, Caitlin for joining us. You can follow her on Instagram @codercaitlin and read bits of her blog at codercaitlin.io
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading to the bottom and as usual, if you have feedback on anything Club-related (the community, the newsletter), drop us a line here.
So excited!!!!