Recap of my ten-week internship at Capital One (minus confidential stuff):

Week 1: Onboarding. All interns across all locations met in Richmond for the first week to get set up, network, and participate in social events. My favorite day by far was the day where we went to Kings Dominion. Overall, this week was fun, but it was pretty disjoint from the remaining weeks.

Week 2: After taking the shuttle back to McLean, I finally got introduced to the project. Unlike at Amazon, the interns were collectively working on the same project. The project description was fairly complex for me, so I didn’t really know what was going on. We also got various tech stuff set up as a team.

Weeks 3-5: I don’t really remember much about the rest of June. Outside of work, I mostly played Super Kirby Clash and Splatoon 3 on my Switch, and I occasionally went out to dinner with some other interns from my apartment. I also learned that jae/kattiscoder (on Codeforces) was not only interning at Capital One and at McLean, but he was also living in the same apartment as me. After Week 5 was the fourth of July weekend, and I flew back home and had a lot of fun hanging out with DraticalSA1.

Week 6: Intern hackathon. On Monday and Tuesday, I participated in my first hackathon. Since I was still new to this type of thing, I didn’t really contribute much, and the one feature that I got working was vibecoded oops. But our team ended up getting third place out of ~15 teams, which was big.

Weeks 7-8: After finishing Super Kirby Clash 100%, I moved onto playing only Splatoon 3, mostly Salmon Run. As for work, my final task was dependent on others’ tasks being finished, which didn’t happen until Week 10. So in the meantime, I was stuck trying to find things to do, which ended up being reading others’ PRs, reading documentation, and finishing training modules. I also got introduced to poker via my roommate and some of his intern friends, so I played a few times, and that was really fun.

Week 9: After Week 8, I realized how close we were getting to the end of the internship. I began reflecting on how fun it was and how I would like to work there after graduating. Week 9 was more of the same as Weeks 7-8, but on Thursday, there was another fun social event, where I played bowling and sometimes got spares.

Week 10: On Monday, our team had our final presentation, and it was pretty chill. After that was completely free, but I worked on my final task while others were completely done. Thursday was super fun because we had a final social event where my whole team took a group photo and said our goodbyes. Unfortunately, I started feeling pain somewhere in my body, which caused me so much irritation that I could barely move on Saturday. Miraculously, it felt mostly better on Sunday, so I was able to fly back home safely.