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Day In The Life | Intern Edition: What It’s Like To Intern At Mozilla

Estimated reading time ~ 5 min
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Beatriz Rizental
Job: Application Services Intern, Mozilla
Location: San Francisco, CA
Twitter: Mozilla

6:00am: My alarm goes off. When I first got to San Francisco from my hometown in Southern Brazil, my jet lag made it really easy to get up early in the morning. After almost two months into my internship, my jet lag is just a memory. Now I’m back to hitting snooze a few times. Once I’m up, I shower and head to the Mozilla office, where I’m interning for the summer. This is actually my second internship with this company. Last summer, I was an Outreachy Intern with the Webcompatibility team. I first learned about this internship at Mozilla when my mentor suggested it was a good fit for me.

7:00am: The office is a just 15-minute walk away from my corporate housing. (Mozilla provides housing for interns; I live with three other women also interning at the company.) During my walk to the office, I listen to one of my favorite podcasts, which can vary from fiction (Alice is Not Dead) to news and politics (The Ezra Klein Show) to tech (The Changelog). I don't immediately get to work when I arrive at the office. First I go to the kitchen and prepare myself a nice bowl of greek yogurt and mixed berries. I’ll have breakfast while I finish my podcast and maybe skim Reddit.

8:00am: Now it’s time to get to work. The interns are all assigned to a place in the "Boardroom,” which is a very big meeting room at the office. Many of us also have "hot desks," which are open desks we can use whenever the Boardroom gets too noisy. After I’ve sat at my desk, the first thing I do is check for any pending notifications on GitHub, our project management system. There’s usually a lot of reviews and comments for me to check in the early hours, because a lot of people from my team are in the UK and Australia. After I’m done, I'll check in with my engineering mentor, who was assigned to me at the start of the internship, to see if he has anything for me to do. He’s in Toronto, which is three hours ahead of San Francisco, so he’s usually had some time to cook up some good assignments for me. Working through my task list with my mentor allows me to have a very structured day. As a methodical person, this level of organization is incredibly satisfying.

9:00am: From now until 11:30am is my coding paradise. I have developed a good pace since the beginning of the internship and can code without many interruptions. I'm working with the Firefox Accounts team to build an email sending service written in Rust. Even though I have been working on web development projects for many years, they were mostly in Python, Node.js, and PHP. It took me a bit of time to get a good pace with Rust. I'm very lucky to have a lot of mentors at Mozilla who are patient and help me understand the different paradigms of this new language and development environment. As a self-taught programmer, it’s very exciting to have so many amazing and smart people to learn from. Initially, I had stumbled into front-end web development, learning what I could online in a very organic and unstructured way, taking courses online and watching YouTube videos. That led to internships in Brazil and from there, I learned backend development. With the training at Mozilla, it’s increasingly apparent how much faster I’m growing as a professional and as a person.

11:30am: It’s lunch time! Mozilla provides lunch everyday of the week at the San Francisco office, and we have some special days such as "Pizza Fridays" and "Taco Tuesdays" (or as I call them "Sour Cream Day" because I love sour cream). This is the time of day where I can relax and have fun with the other interns. After we eat, some of us go up to the deck on the seventh floor, where we get a little sunshine, enjoy the great view of the bay, and decompress before going back to work. We are a very diverse group of interns. Here in the San Francisco office we have 20 interns, most of them are from the US and Canada, but we also have some people from Europe and India. That makes for very interesting conversations. I’ve learned so much by hearing their perspectives. We also get good laughs trying to teach each other how to speak our native languages.

12:30pm: Time to get back to work. Most meetings happen around this time or at 2pm. My team is not very big on meetings, which I enjoy, because I have most of the afternoon to focus on my tasks. Apart from my team meetings, we also have an Intern Speaker Series, where all the interns have the opportunity to chat with senior leaders at Mozilla. At these series, we get the opportunity to have some very honest conversations about how everything gets done in the company. These talks are really interesting, and they happen roughly once every two weeks. We also have the Woman Speaker Series, where women employees at Mozilla discuss their trajectory in tech.

3:30pm: Around this time, my brain starts to melt from all the coding, so I'll take a break. I'll usually call some of the other interns and we’ll relax on the deck, get some snacks, or play a little ping pong.

5:00pm: My work day is almost over, so I’ll start wrapping things up before I leave. This is when I deliver any code that I’ve worked on for review. I also track any work that’s still in progress as well as leave any questions or comments I have for the other developers to review and answer.

6:00pm: By the time I get home, I'm usually starving, so I'll start preparing dinner. I don't really enjoy cooking, but I do enjoy eating home-cooked meals, so I make the effort to prepare brown rice, chicken, and veggies. I usually make a little bit extra, so I don't have to cook everyday. I use this moment to call any friends or family back in Brazil. These calls tend to last longer than dinner, so I’ll probably still be on the phone while I’m doing the dishes.

7:00pm: I’ll head to the gym to run and stretch. I'm very lucky to have one right in my building. Though it still takes a lot of willpower for me to go, it makes me feel a lot better when I do and it helps me fall asleep faster.

10:00pm: My day is over. Before going to sleep I write in my diary about all the things that went through my mind during the day. Finally, I watch any new videos on my Youtube channels or read any new blog posts that appear on my Feedly. When I'm done with that, I just turn on something random on Netflix and wait to fall asleep.

Images courtesy of Katt Taylor

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