software engineer intern Review

It was an exceptional experience. I had the opportunity to work in a great team, with young and enthousiastic people. Also the team field of activity was attractive to me. I had the opportunity to contribute to an open source project, as part of my work, to interact with main contributors to the project, to see my project running in production.

Through the entire internship, I has support from my mentor. He was young, enthusiastic and very clever. He knew how to interact and work with people. He definitely had a great technical expertise and also represented an example to me, when it came to how behave and interact with other people in our team. Also I had weekly meetings with my manager, in which we discussed my progress, the next steps etc.

I had the opportunity to work in an Agile team. I understood the philosophy behind Agile planning and I actually saw it in practice. Our daily stand-ups were very useful to me, because I had the opportunity to understand what my teammates were doing and I could also ask questions and benefit of the full team expertise. Also I had the opportunity to work and learn things about Lucene/Solr, an open source project which was new to me.

The atmosphere was relaxed. We had full access to out pantry in which we could find fresh fruits, tea and coffee, cereals in the morning, a 3pm daily treat etc. I worked i a financial company, so it was interesting to walk through the floors full with traders , programmers and business people. Everyone was cheerful very polite and you could easily approach anyone if you had any questions.

We had a lot of intern events. For example, each Friday we had lunch&learn sessions, in which people with different backgrounds, working in different departments within the corporation, came and held presentations with the solely purpose of making us understand better the Bloomberg culture. This opened our appetite for learning more things about the financial world, how a software product fits into it, which are the main problems the company is struggling with, how it manages revolutionary solutions all the time etc.

I had constant support from my mentor. More than this, I could ask anyone in my team for help, and benefit of their expertise. Also I benefit of a 2 week training, customized for interns. I had the possibility to attend to software development presentations, held by senior engineers. Also I had access to a lot of internal chats where I could ask questions about everything and get a elaborated response all the time.

I worked in central London so the accomodation prices in the area were significant. However I benfit of a relocation stipened from the company which covered my rent for 3 months. Apart from that, the living prices were average. It is a well known fact that prices in London for drinks or food are high than average but if you explore the area and look for the best deals, you don't need to spend a fortune each time when you get out in town.

The Nightlife in London is extraordinary. Beside the fact that all the clubs and discos close by 2am in London you can find eveything you want. From disco, house or trance clubs, pubs, offering a great variety of beverages to gay or strip clubs. Areas like Soho or Shoreditch should be a must to on everyones's To do list.

Bloomberg culture is focused a lot on philanthropy and volunteering. You have a lot of opportunities to do volunteering work involving different skills and different organizations options. The also organized a one day hackathon inside Bloomberg, where we could work for different organizations (like The Royal Parks, The Old Vic), trying to came up with software solutions to their problems.