An internship is one of the first opportunities for many students to take theory out of the classroom and apply it in the real world. Which is why at Cohesity, we work to ensure our interns are truly a part of our Life at Cohesity and experience the Cohesian experience firsthand.
At Cohesity, our internship program offers university students a chance to go beyond the rote tasks and uninteresting paper pushing offered by so many internships out there. Our interns get their hands dirty, learn responsibility, and make an impact.
To showcase all the amazing things our University Program team is doing to set up our internship program and nurture the next generation of tech talent, we’ve taken the opportunity to talk to some of the great interns the team has brought into Cohesity this summer.
I’m at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. I’m studying human and organizational development, as well as data science, which may change. I’ve got about a year until I graduate.
I’m with the Customer Marketing Team.
I found Cohesity while searching through LinkedIn. Cohesity had the job criteria I was looking for. I first applied to the Partner Marketing internship, but that didn’t work out. However, my Cohesity recruiter told me about the internship within the Marketing Team and explained details of the role, what I would be doing during the internship, and asked whether I’d be interested.
It was really great. Simple. I had the number of my recruiter, so if I had any questions I could reach out. My manager was also ready at all times to help me get in touch with the people I needed information from.
Right now I’m working with a lot of data, obviously, but specifically on an Executive Briefing Center dashboard that helps look at company numbers each quarter, as well as annually. I work with all types of teams, actually. That’s great, because I’m learning all sorts of different things, rather than just one.
I had an idea of the work I was getting into through my recruiter, but I didn’t realize the depth of experience I’d be getting. I had to be really open-minded in terms of setting expectations.
I worked in tech as a social media intern for an on-demand learning platform, but it wasn’t anything like working here. I was always interested in working [with] tech, and had been preparing for over a year to get a tech job. I did my due diligence on Cohesity, but the experience has been a lot better than I imagined.
It’s been the teams. I love how laid back and open everyone is. Cohesity doesn’t have a cutthroat environment. At Vanderbilt, there’s a lot of pressure to overachieve and to overwork, and that carries a huge amount of stress. At Cohesity, everyone is working really hard, and achieving at a high level, but they’re also looking to help me succeed as well. People are easy to reach out to, and they check in regularly to see how I’m doing.
I’m a first year graduate student at UW Madison.
I worked for three years as a full stack engineer, so was familiar with Cohesity. I also was referred by a current Cohesian and friend from undergrad university, Udit Gupta.
I was interested in working with a company that was closely aligned with my interests, which had previously included distributed systems. Cohesity was exactly what I was looking for.
The only expectation I had was for myself: that I’d do good work, which would be fulfilling.
This is very different. Right now my work is largely related to C++ code/Go and distributed systems, and the code platform that Cohesity has is much more challenging and unique to work with than what I was previously working on.
I’m getting an opportunity to talk to a lot of people and get second opinions, work my way through things and solve problems, which is a really great experience all around. I’ve also been able to work in different areas as well. When I started I was on a networking project, which included building a proof of concept, and I’ve also been able to work on implementing security features as a lead developer for a big customer. It has some strict deadlines and it will actually be going into production, which is something I couldn’t ever imagine doing as an intern.
I think one of the biggest challenges for me has been finding good ways to communicate, because all the people on a project might not be in the same country. Also, learning the Go programming language that is used here for the first time has introduced me to think distributed whenever I write code now. I’ve also learned and developed my skills in writing Bash Scripts, configuring Linux systems, and doing proof of concepts in networking and security. All of these challenges have allowed me to advance my technical skills which I have been learning in university. The challenges that I have overcome and worked through here at Cohesity have been invaluable to my development and have been extremely rewarding, and not to mention, fun!
I’m a junior at Denison University double majoring in Communications and French.
This summer I’ve been an internal communications intern. I help the team streamline communication across the company and its people.
My dad works here, in Sales for SmartFiles! He’d worked in tech before, and I remember when he made the switch back to tech to join Cohesity, I thought: hm, that’s a funny name. I didn’t think about it much. Then, when I was looking for an internship in the spring, my dad recommended that I look here.
I think I thought the internship would be more structured, but it’s more free flowing. Which is a good thing! People are helping me learn what I want to know, and unlike classes at school where there’s a curriculum, I’m getting a lot more choice on what kind of role I want to play, and not just fitting into some expectation.
Well, I think I ended up having conversations with people in teams I wouldn’t have initially thought I would make contact with. During my first week, I was assigned to schedule a bunch of meetings with a variety of people, to learn more about their roles. When you look at a company like Cohesity, you’re thinking about engineers, and coding, but there are a lot more people working on the back end to make it happen. Those meetings gave me the insight that hey, if I want to work in tech, I don’t exactly need to learn code. There are a lot of other opportunities.
If anything, it’s exceeded them. The wide array of things I’ve gotten to do has been really eye opening. Also, I’ve been taught a lot of things, including stuff about personal branding, that has applications outside of the internship and my role here. It’s been game changing.
I’m originally from Central Jersey, but went down to Georgia to study Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
I knew I was going to go into a STEM area, because I was always really good at math and science. I didn’t really know what being an engineer was, or anything about computer science, until my junior year of high school.
I saw the job posting on LinkedIn during the fall semester. The coordinator for the university program reached out to me in February or March. I’d completely forgotten about applying!
Yes, it was my first time as an intern, and also my first time working in tech.
Both of my parents work in tech, but both of their work environments are really different. Really, I didn’t know what to expect at Cohesity, especially since I’d be working remotely.
I’m working on client-facing code, so basically the UI, and what the customer sees and interacts with, but also how it interacts with the backend. I’m currently working with the team on improving the backend structure, looking through the code, the API, unit testing, and seeing any places where we can make a difference.
I’m on the East Coast, so I’m generally up earlier than my mentor and the people I generally work with on the West Coast. So, normally I have a few hours in the morning to get some work done and get everything set up and consolidated. Then I’ll have a few meetings going into the afternoon, before I meet with my mentor to talk about any blockers, or challenges for me. My mentor is really on top of things and has helped me find solutions to a lot of problems.
When I made my first code review! I had the opportunity to push my own changes and get them integrated into the Cohesity product code base. A lot of times software interns are given a project that you work on by yourself, in a corner, and then you present it. Usually, that code isn’t used for anything. I think it’s super cool that not only is my code being reviewed and put to the same standard as everyone else, but that it’s also going to be used by developers in the future.