Meet our Intern-ets! Hosted by Michelle Zatlyn

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to meeting our amazing summer internships here at Cloudflare. I'm Michelle Zatlyn.

I'm one of the co -founders of Cloudflare, also our president and chief operating officer.

And I'm so excited to spend some time with the class of 2024 class of interns at Cloudflare.

I've done this several summers.

It's always a highlight hearing about what all these awesome people are working on and their backgrounds and kind of what they got out of their summer internships.

I find that summer internships, if you're looking for one, can be a little bit mysterious.

Like what did other people do? What did they do that I didn't do?

How did they go about getting it? And we're going to cover all of that today so we can get started.

We're spending the next hour together and we're going to cover a lot of ground.

And so, you know, we have a great group of folks here.

We had over 60 interns at Cloudflare. So of course, we don't have all 60 here, but we have a great group here.

And we're going to start by just asking them to introduce themselves, what school they go to, and then what they worked on this summer as a starting point.

And so, Daniela, do you mind kicking us off if you kind of kick off who you are, what school you go to and what you worked on this summer?

Sure. Thank you, Michelle. So hi, everyone. I'm Daniela. I'm based in Lisbon, Portugal.

I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and I've worked on with a data team on a Grafana plugin to work with our GraphQL API.

Awesome. Thank you.

We love that. We have offices in many locations around the world, including beautiful Lisbon.

And so thanks for spending the summer with us, Daniela. We're going to hear more about what you worked on.

All right, Matilde, why don't you go next?

Hi, everyone. My name is Matilde. I'm based out of the Lisbon office, although I live a bit farther off from the north with Portugal.

I'm a software engineering intern in the DevTools team, and I'm also a master's student, a software engineering master's student.

To give a bit more context, the DevTools team is responsible for the tools and the services that we use internally, namely the engineers.

And so my project consisted in integrating our bootstrap application into the main developer portal.

So basically the main goal of the developer portal is to centralize all of the information related to all of our services.

And basically I contributed to a feature that allows engineers to bootstrap new applications, basically doing all the initial setup.

That's great. Well, we, Cloudflare loves to ship things.

In fact, there's a great blog post, a great blog post about we put the ship back into internship.

And so Matilde, you being able to set up all these internal tools allows all of our team across the company to really ship different sorts of things for all of our customers around the world and for the Internet.

So thanks so much for being here. So two folks out of our Lisbon office.

All right, Luis, you're next. Oh, it would not be 2024.

I think you're on mute. Okay.

Well, sometimes doing things live are tricky. I'm having some technical difficulties.

Can all of you hear me? You can hear me. Okay. Oh, now I can hear everyone.

All right. Good. Technical difficulties have passed. All right. Phew. All right.

Sorry, Luis. I missed what you said, but did you introduce yourself? Yeah.

Okay. You did. All right. Great. All right. All right, Luis. So let's go on to you.

Why don't you share who you are, where you're working, what you worked on this summer?

Hello, everyone. My name is Larissa. I am working remotely from Portugal as well.

I have, I'm finishing my degree in web development and I'm working with CERT, the security incident response.

I didn't work in a project specifically, but I did work a bunch of small projects and was able to learn a lot from the security team and also Cloudflare.

That's great. That's great. Good. Well, I feel like that's the best part of an internship is meeting people.

I think meeting some of the folks, but also getting to apply all these things you learn and seeing how it works in real life.

And Hey, everyone.

I'm Rahul and I'm based out of the Austin office. I'm currently pursuing my master's in computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Over the summer, I had the chance to work with the ETI team as a software engineer intern.

My project kind of involved building a scalable take-home auto-grader system that helps us automatically grade thousands of take-home submissions that's going to be used to hire the next set of interns and possibly new grads at Cloudflare.

So it was quite an interesting problem to work on. And the best part is it's completely built on the Cloudflare developer platform.

So got a chance to work with different products like workers, KV, D1, and we had a bunch of interns who even tested it out to make sure that the system works.

So it was exciting. Thank you.

That's exciting. The fact that you built something and people are using it says a lot, Rahul.

So that's great. Thanks for being here with us today. All right, Blaise, your turn.

Hi, I'm Blaise and I'm based in the London office. So I've been working with the BDR operations team, which is kind of like the sales operations team.

Similar to Larissa, I didn't have one big project. I was kind of working alongside a whole host of different projects and getting to meet different people, trying to streamline sales processes across all of our different regions, as well as look at how we can create bigger and better opportunities to get Cloudflare products out there.

That's great. Well, it was so nice to meet you personally in person when I was in London.

I spent about a month in London working and living there earlier this summer and it was so nice to meet you in our office there.

So thanks for spending the summer with us. All right, Tara, you're next. Hello, everyone.

I'm Tara. I'm also a software developer intern in the Q's team. So that's the team responsible for message Q's in Cloudflare's workers environment.

I'm a student studying software engineering at the University of Waterloo.

So I traveled all the way from there to Austin to do my internship.

And yeah, I'm having a great time.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah. And the project I'm working on, I'm working on implementing exploration as part of the Q's environment so that these messages can actually move along if nobody uses them.

So yeah. That's great. I love that. I love that you go to school at Waterloo in Canada, but you're spending the summer in Austin.

That's great.

That's what summer internships are all about, seeing the world. So excellent. Happy you're here.

All right. We're going to talk a little bit more about how you picked your location or whether that even came into your calculus at all.

But Billy, you're next.

Thank you, Michelle. Hey, everyone. My name is Billy Cervales. I've been a research scientist intern with the bots team.

I'm also a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University.

I do research on web security and bots. So the project that I worked on was about account signup fraud.

So we developed a new signal. We did our data analysis.

We looked at competition. What can we do to develop something innovative?

And we actually created a new fraud signal to find malicious actors that try to exploit web applications.

Oh, yeah. I'm based out of New York working remote.

Thank you. That's great. Thank you. You all are covering the world.

We have lots of different locations for internships. And again, I am constantly reminded Cloudflare is a very global company with customers around the world.

And we have people around the world. And I think our intern class really helps.

This group here helps reflect that. Folks are really based in lots of places around the world.

So that's great. All right. Utkarsh, you're next. Hey, everyone.

I'm Utkarsh. And I'm a master's student from Stony Brook University.

That's in New York. And I just finished one year in America yesterday. So that's a great achievement.

And yeah, I'm currently working with the capacity planning team in Cloudflare.

And my task is to build an additional internal tool for the team where they can model hypothetical scenarios for the future and see what can happen in the future and how it will impact our network infrastructure and whether our current network will be able to handle the loads, the growth that we are facing, and all the different possibilities.

So yeah, it has been an exciting two months.

I'm looking forward to how it turns out with the team. That's great.

Thank you. Remind us where you're based. I'm from New York. You're based in New York, too.

Okay, perfect. All right. Thank you so much. That's great. Well, so many of your projects cover so many different parts of the business, which is really interesting, too.

All right, Tanuj, you're next. Hello, everyone. I'm Tanuj. And I'm interning as a marketing analytics intern as part of the marketing strategy and insights team.

And I go to school at UC San Diego. And that's where I'm based in.

So just to give you some context, if you look at the potential journey of a Cloudflare customer, usually what happens is firstly, the marketing team invites them to some sort of events.

And not all people attend these events. But the people which do, they are then followed up by an AE or a BDR.

And eventually down the line, negotiations happen, and the deal is either closed or we lose that deal.

So all of these interactions from various teams, like the sales team, marketing team, they're all recorded as data points in the system.

So the projects I've been working on is to analyze this data and answer questions.

For example, if a person fills out a web form or an interest form, what's the conversion rate?

And then if a person attends a seminar, how likely is it that down the line he's going to end up being a Cloudflare customer?

So that's what I've been working on this summer. That's great. Thanks, Tanuj.

It's a good explanation of something that's kind of complicated or hard to put into everyday language.

So thanks for sharing that with the audience. Carol, how about you?

Thanks, Michelle. Hi, my name is Carol. I'm a student also at the University of Waterloo.

So that's based in Canada. I came all the way down here to Austin, Texas right now.

And throughout my internship, oh, by the way, I'm based in the R2 team.

Throughout my internship, I have been working on driving a main project, which was exposing R2 migration logs to customers to mainly just to expose migration visibility and provide insight into unpredictable failure cases in case a migration might go wrong partly or fully.

And I've also been driving the development of an official domains management API for R2 for customers who want to publicly expose their buckets using a URL.

Nice. That's great. Well, R2 is an important product for us, one that's growing really quickly.

So thanks for helping make it better this summer.

And I think those are some great examples. All right, Marco, and then Nikhil, the last two, and then we're going to jump into the next question.

All right, Marco, take it away. Thank you, Michelle. My name is Marco.

I am a software engineer intern in the data team, more specifically in the Clickhouse team.

I studied in Porto. I finished my bachelor's degree in software engineering a month ago.

And yeah, I came to Lisbon to do this internship with Buffer.

And my project was developing an internal tool for the team to help them analyze which queries, like when they see a query that is slower than it should be, it helps them track down what is the issue happening.

And I am also contributing to Clickhouse itself, which is a big and open source project.

So that's also really cool.

Yeah. Nice. That's great. I think it feels really good to be able to contribute back to the open source.

So that's great, Marco. All right, Nikhil, finish us off. Thanks so much, Michelle.

I actually have technically ended my internship, but I'm coming to you from San Francisco.

I spent most of the summer in Austin and a little bit in San Francisco as well.

Got to check out both offices. I worked under the ETI team in the workers AI team, and I got to do a bunch of my work on inference optimization.

So trying to make workers AI the best in class platform for inference from the edge and trying out a bunch of new techniques, some novel, some already known to speed up inference, evaluating them and then implementing some of them.

And I also got to do an internal use case for workers AI, which involved providing better captioning models for the streams team, which, as you know, is the video chat that sometimes powers our beer meetings.

I also, I go to Columbia in New York and I'm from California.

So I've kind of been all over the place, but yeah, had a great time in Austin this summer.

That's great. Awesome. All right. So we have a wonderful group of folks here, different cities, different teams, different colleges or universities, depending on which part of the world you're in.

And, and just, it's, it's amazing to see the diversity of the backgrounds and the projects and the teams that you were all a part of.

And so one of the questions, how we're going to run the next hour is not all of you have to answer every question, but I'll, I have different prompts.

And if you have an answer, like, please chime in. And then if you have something to build off or a different point of view, please share that.

And then we'll go to the next, the next question. But one of my first questions I want to ask this group is kind of, when you think about your summer internship, what was one of the highlights for you being a summer intern at Cloudflare?

I would probably say like the, the intern program that they put on, getting to meet so many of the kind of senior leaders of Cloudflare through talks with the other interns and them, or we could ask them just like very honest questions and understand kind of the early days of Cloudflare and what they do.

I think that was a huge highlight for me.

You often don't get that opportunity to talk to people so senior in companies.

And I think that's something super special that you get to do at Cloudflare.

That's great. That's good. Go, okay, go ahead, Rahul, and then Marco.

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Michelle. So I think another highlight of the internship was, and based off what I've interacted with most of the other interns is that the projects that we got to work on are like not separate projects just for interns.

They're like actual things that is being used like on production.

And I think most of us also had the opportunity to kind of ship things to production during our time of the internship.

So it's great to see that we are kind of being kind of treated as part of the entire team and got to work on something which is like critical to the user.

So that was exciting. That's great. Yeah, these are, these are, you all work on things that we really need shipped and done.

And it's amazing that we are able to find awesome interns to help us work on it.

But if not, someone else would have also done it. So I think that's a really good point.

Okay, go ahead, Marco. And then Carol, then we'll go to the next question.

Go ahead, Marco. Yeah, I would like to share the highlight for my internship was in my second week of the internship, my team have been planning an on site week of events.

And so they actually invited me to go like, just two or three days before.

And I accepted and I spent a week in London with the team. And I got to, to meet everyone and to be in the London office and just meet a lot of people and do a lot of cool and interesting activities.

No, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, the power of the Internet is amazing connecting all of us, but it feels really good to build social bonds to of course, internships are to get to know how some work gets done at companies and see the inside of a company.

But at the end of the day, you're meeting people too, and starting to build your network and forming friendships and folks that you might cross paths many times in your career together.

So that's great.

I love that you were able to spend time in person with some folks. As an intern, I think that's really important.

All right, Carol, how about you?

What was one of the highlights for you? Yeah, I was about to echo the same sentiments as Marco and Rahul.

I think that getting to like the events are that the company is hosted, the onsites and stuff, but I got to like meet and connect and network with not just other interns, other full-timers in my team, as well as in other teams as well.

So there's a lot of cross-pollination going on. Well, I think that's one of the, it's interesting you said like the cross-functional piece of it is, you know, sometimes I think people join a company and, hey, I'm going to be in engineering, I'm going to be a product manager, or I'm going to marketing, or I'm on the BDR team.

And we heard all of those examples of folks in the intern class today.

And of course, you're in that department. But what's interesting about modern day work is how cross-functional it is.

It's, you know, you might be shipping a product, but then you have to go partner with marketing to get it out the door, or you have to partner with these other cross-functional teams.

And I think that's really kind of the modern day workplace is so cross -functional.

And so I love that you brought that up and that you got to meet people from different teams and different departments.

And I think that's really great.

Okay, we've heard so many different highlights. Anybody else have one more to add that someone hasn't brought up before we move on to the next question?

Yeah, I can.

Sorry, I can bring up. I'm very grateful for the intern area that they had set up in the Austin office.

I think, back to Carol's point, it also provided for all us interns to not only talk about our lives, but also about our projects.

And we had like intern standups that we had organized ourselves, where we spoke about what we were working on.

And it was a great way for us to get help and more information about different teams and what they're working on.

So that was really awesome.

That's great. That's great. Well, I love that our team did that. And one of my longtime colleagues, Dave Connect, is a huge executive sponsor of this program.

And he thought it was really important for all of our interns in Austin to have a place to come together and to build those connections.

And it sounds like you really appreciated that.

So shout out to Dane, that was his idea. So it always feels good when you have an idea and see it come to life and see it full circle.

So that's great.

Okay, so thank you for sharing all those. It's always great to hear about highlights.

So let's totally shift gears, okay? What's something that was maybe harder than you thought doing a summer internship?

What's maybe something that was harder than you thought that you want to share with the audience or that you thought, I wish I had known before I had done my summer internship?

And especially if you've done more than one, just kind of what's something that maybe is not widely known?

All right, Billy, go ahead. So we're obviously a security-oriented company.

And one of the things is access management. It's something that takes a lot of time.

That's objective. So you need to really learn how to time box quickly and multitask and switch the context smoothly.

And on another note, I think I learned how to pivot from one thing to another quite well, in the same context.

So you have the results you want, you don't have the results you want, you need to be able to not be stubbornly stuck on something and switch gears to make sure you get the impact you want.

So yeah. Good. All right. Great. Sorry, Karsh, you're next.

Thanks, Michelle. I would say pretty much my entire internship, when I really started the internship program and Anurag, who's my manager, told me about, okay, this is something that you have to build.

And the first time I heard it was like, okay, so it's basically a web application that I have to build.

Yeah, I've been doing that a long time, so I can do that.

But as I started building it and I came across the complexities that we have, that the entire team has, and the learning curve of understanding all the different terminologies and how everything works in the network infrastructure, that was really phenomenal.

And I have never, ever worked at this scale of data before, the kind of queries that we have on the backend.

So yeah, everything with the backend complexities was something that I'd never imagined that I'd be working on, but I'm glad I got the opportunity.

That's great.

It's interesting, the scale at which Clover operates was surprising, and that means the amount of data.

And I know there's some other folks in the data team. So it's just, it's a lot of data.

And you're like, wow, that's a lot of signal. How do we find some great applicable insights from all of that?

And it does, sometimes the scale is both a huge asset, but it's also makes things harder.

So I think that makes a lot of sense.

And this other one around, just, there's a lot to learn.

You're almost like drinking from a fire hose every day. And I've been at Clover since the first day, and I feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose every day.

And I helped start the company. It just never ends. And I think when you are at a place where the industry is growing and changing, this constant curiosity and wanting to learn is a really important skillset.

So thanks for bringing that up, Akarsha.

It is a never-ending learning journey. And don't worry, I'm still learning 14 years in, so you're not alone.

But thank you so much for sharing all of that.

Matilda, why don't you go next? Yeah. So my biggest challenge was actually managing time and expectations.

I think from the start, you just plan out your project.

You have specific milestones and delivery dates. And I think that there are some things that you can't predict.

Of course, you discuss with your colleagues at first so that you can avoid that.

But there's always some obstacles that you didn't expect to encounter.

And in my case, I was working with an open-source application.

So I just came across a few limitations that no one knew about, and they took me a lot more time than I was expecting.

So I think it might keep the feeling that you're not doing a good job because you were supposed to have finished that a week ago.

But that's why my biggest takeaway, one of the biggest takeaways that I got from the internship is just accepting that we should have goals, but they shouldn't be written in stone because there are a lot of things that might change and you just can't predict them.

That's good. That's really good. Thanks for sharing that.

And so actually really articulately shared it really well, where you get a lot new, every kind of every day you get more data points and input.

And so sometimes that changes kind of the outcome or what's possible.

And sometimes you can see around corners and predict those things.

And other times it's hard to see around the corners and it really does kind of derail what you thought.

And I think that's almost like you have to be able to mentally adapt and adjust.

And so that's a great lesson to learn this summer.

So thank you for sharing that. All right, Daniela, what about you?

What's something that was maybe harder than you thought or something you learned this summer?

Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So one of my biggest challenges was not a technical one, was more of a communication wise one, which was being open to ask questions.

Personally, I think I'm an introvert. And so asking questions for me, it's sometimes hard.

And in university, I tend to be afraid to ask questions.

And whenever I'm stuck with a problem, trying to figure out the solution, I try to push through without talking to anyone or asking anyone.

And here, since we are working in a much bigger scale than in comparison to university, we are almost bound to ask questions and stumble into things that we cannot fix by ourselves.

And so, yeah, it made me realize that asking questions and asking for help is really valuable.

And here at Cloudflare, everyone is willing to help and likes to help.

And so, yeah, that's it. That's great. Yeah, I'm glad you shared that because it's something now where I'm so comfortable being at Cloudflare that it is kind of easy to just ask someone, hey, what do you think?

So you get comfortable.

But it wasn't always like that. And it is sometimes hard to be like, oh, what if someone doesn't reply?

Or what if they're mean to me? Or what if they're like, why are you bothering me?

And you got to tell these stories in your head.

It's hard. You stop yourself from asking. But then that actually kind of holds you back.

And so, good for you for bringing that up and recognizing that I'm working on it.

And I do think that not every company is like that and not every workplace is like that.

But I think if you can find one where it is like that, it feels really supportive and collaborative where it's like, oh, we're in this together.

We're one team, not me versus you. So, yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you for bringing that up.

Okay, anything else that maybe was a bit harder than you thought, that you thought folks would, that the audience would benefit from before we move on?

All right, Tanuj, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I actually did not think this was going to be a challenge.

But when I started, I just had too much data.

And I just did not know, like, what am I supposed to do with so much data? Like, because I had like, in my first week, I was analyzing five, six million rows of data, and I was just completely lost.

But the way I sort of dealt with that was, you know, just talk to different team members.

And one of the things I noticed was, you know, like, when you talk to people, you realize that there's like three or four common pain points or like problems that usually everyone has.

And that sort of helped me to prioritize instead of, you know, just looking at so much data, just narrow it down to a specific problem, which is going to be relevant for my team, and for the company as well.

So that was something which I, which was a challenge, but I learned to like, learned a lot from it.

Good for you, Tanuj.

Yeah, and I think that a lot of us be overwhelmed with five or six million rows of data, be like, what are we going to do with all this?

So good for you for kind of seeing that as an opportunity to say, let's find a path forward.

So thank you so much for sharing that and good for you.

All right, Carol, go ahead. I think owning a project from start to finish in the intern projects was a very interesting and enlightening experience for me.

Particularly just like you have to, if you're driving a feature from start to finish, you need to consider everything as much as you can and complete that as much as you can.

For instance, writing a spec from the ground up, you need to consider this and you need to have discussions with your team to make sure that you're getting the complete picture.

And I think that that really trained me to, I think I learned a lot of planning skills, as well as got better as a developer just from having to do this sort of pre-planning.

Yes, yes, that's good.

Well, it's an amazing thing to be able to see it from start to finish, but there's a lot that comes with that.

You're like, well, there's other parts of the life cycle that I maybe hadn't been exposed to before.

And that's the whole point of summer internships is to see the inner workings of different teams and companies and how they do things in different industries.

And again, I think really for all those future summer interns looking, it's like you want to try a lot of different things.

Life is a collection of experiences and getting a flavor of different sorts of things so you can see what you like and don't like.

It's much easier if you go experience it yourself than just hear stories from others.

So that's great, Carol. Thanks for sharing the life cycle point of view.

Okay, let's move on. So we've kind of talked about some of the highlights.

We've talked about things that maybe were harder than we thought. I want to talk about location because I think location is so interesting, especially given this kind of post-COVID world where there's more flexibility about being able to work in lots of different places, but also location still matters.

And we have interns here who are in New York.

We have folks who are in Lisbon, Austin, some San Francisco.

And so I'd love to hear, how did you think about location when you were picking your summer internship?

Was that important to you at all? Go ahead, Luis.

So firstly, I thought of doing an internship remotely because I'm from the north of Portugal and it's quite far away.

And then I thought, yeah, I'm young, I don't have anything to lose, so I'm going to Lisbon, even temporarily, to see the city and so forth.

And honestly, I don't regret it. It was hard to find a house.

It was, I think, the hardest part, but I don't regret it at all. And it was fun to be presentially with my team, the other people at the company, and of course, my interns.

That's great. Thank you for sharing that. That's great. Blaise, go ahead.

London, I didn't even mention London. Go ahead, Blaise. Yeah, so I think the London office is amazing.

I'm from London, live in London, go to university in London, and so it was a pretty obvious choice for working here.

London is obviously the city with so many different things going on, and the London office is in such a special location.

I mean, it's right by the London Eye in a very historic building, County Hall.

We have amazing views of the House of Parliament and Big Ben.

So it's in an amazing area. And as someone from London who's lived here, basically haven't seen those sites since I was very, very young.

And it's just been really nice kind of be in the hub.

And being in the office, you just get to meet just so many people.

Not being a technical person, it's been really nice to be around a lot of technical people who have been there to just like chat through any things that I haven't been sure about, teach me different things that I was wondering.

And it's been, the office is super cool. And there's always amazing events going on.

So highly recommend visiting the London office if you can.

All right, great. Love that. Thank you, Blaise. Good. All right, Nikhil and then Larissa.

Go ahead, Nikhil. Thank you.

So like I mentioned, I was in Austin for most of the summer. I was really lucky though, because I got to spend a few weeks in San Francisco as well, which personally was really fun because I'm from here and also got to see some friends.

Professionally, though, I think it was super useful because the area that I'm working in, which is to do with AI and AI infrastructure, a lot of that community is based out of San Francisco.

So not just at the Cloudflare office, but also at the Cloudflare office, there were a lot of events with the open source community and some other meetups that I was able to attend solely because I was there and I had a Cloudflare email.

So I could say I was working at Cloudflare. And I got to forge some really, really cool connections with folks that are working on things that we literally use every day.

For example, the inference server that we're working on optimizing for workers AI.

And then I'll just add to that. I think Austin, it was the first time that I had lived or worked in Austin.

And as you know, what I learned, the live music capital of the world or the US and also a place with some pretty good barbecue and really fun nature to explore.

I just, I had a great time.

I learned not to push myself too much in terms of being outside the entire day, especially given that it was maybe 102 degrees on average with 70% humidity.

But yeah, so both personally and professionally, I think it worked out perfectly.

That's great. Thanks for sharing all that. It's great to hear it in your own words.

All right, Larissa, then Tara. Go ahead, Larissa. Yes. So when I first started my internship, I was still at school.

So I had to choose to work remotely.

And I do work most of my time remotely. And it's awesome. It's amazing. We have a bunch of opportunities to talk to other people.

But at the same time, the times that I did go to the office, it was amazing.

I think meeting everyone, it was amazing meeting all the other interns as well.

And now I wish that I had my internship fully on site.

But yeah, it was amazing either way. It's good. The flexibility, but then the power of in -person connections.

Well said. All right, Matilde, go ahead.

Yeah, so I live in the north of Portugal.

So it's still a bit far from Lisbon. But I'm currently doing a hybrid model.

So I basically go every week and just stay for two or three days.

So it's not always easy because the trip is still a bit long. But it's definitely something that I would do all over again, because it's worth it to just go to the office and meet people in person and attend all these amazing events.

So yeah, I mean, it was. That's great.

Thank you so much for sharing that. All right, Tara, go ahead. Yeah.

So I think I touched on this before, but a few of us moved all the way from Waterloo in Canada.

So that was a big move. And I think it was well organized by Cloudflare, I think, or at least for their first time, from what I can tell, that they had the visas done in time, et cetera.

So that was great. And then finding a place to stay here as well.

It was nice. So I had connections with other interns, so I could collaborate on that beforehand.

And I think the in-person office experience in Austin was also great.

It was a hub of ATI. So like I said, Dane was there.

A lot of other senior members of ATI and I were there. So it was great meeting everyone and seeing all the onsites, sorry, the offsites slash onsites happen.

And also, like I said, the intern area was amazing, because it wasn't just software development interns.

It was BDR. It was sales. It was PMs. And you got to see all their projects.

And you got to see your work being taken by other interns and them working on it as well.

So that was also great. That's great. Tara was chuckling about onsites, offsites, onsites, because we don't have a...

Our policy at Cloudflare is teams get to set how often folks come into the office.

And then what happens often is people, teams get together at the beginning of a project or certain points of the project.

And so it becomes kind of an offsite, but onsite. So you're doing an offsite at our office.

We didn't get rid of our office space. We have really great office space.

People do come in daily to work. It's not mandated, but then often groups, people get together to talk about the kickoff or plan things or to do social things.

And so there's different reasons why teams get together in person.

And so I think we need, clearly we need a better name for our team offsite onsites.

That doesn't, that's a little of a mind meld, but yes, thank you so much for sharing that Tara.

And that is a big move from Waterloo down to Austin, but really great that you were able to do that this summer and enjoy the experience.

I think that's a great, says a lot about the two of you that were willing to do that.

All right, Billy, go ahead.

So as I said, I'm a PhD candidate in New York, so it was kind of simpler to do a remote internship out of New York.

But I do second the sentiment that Larissa described, this sometimes wanting to, to go, to go to a, to an office and talk with people and interact, but a big shout out on that to, to the intern team that really organized remote events.

They, they had intern standups on zoom and all those kinds of things that actually brought us remote interests together in a, in a kind of a different way.

And we had long discussions and we had fun and we talked about our projects and all of this.

That's great. Well, it's a good reminder that you got together virtually and that works too.

So thank you so much.

And our team does, our team does put so much effort into making sure that everyone, no matter where you're located, has a good experience and builds those connections, whether you're making them in person in the office or through these different online events.

And it's just a, it's a good reminder. Okay. So we've talked about location and now the topic of, that I'd love to go to is just how did you go about finding a summer internship?

Because I know that that's something that's top of mind for every student.

There's a lot of students around the world who are thinking about what they want to do for their summer internship.

And of course we're at the end of summer.

So, but as someone who's thinking about next summer, how do they choose?

How did you choose? How did you go about finding it?

Any tips for the audience? Was it easy? Was it hard? I think that I know folks would really love to hear about that.

So Akarsh, go ahead and go first. Oh, I think you're on mute.

I'm sorry. Yeah. Sorry. I was saying I had a very exciting story regarding my internship because I got the offer very late in the academic year.

So my entire interview process started in May and my internship started in June.

So it was a very short timeline. And I remember that I was almost of the opinion that, okay, I probably won't be interning for the summer.

And early in April, I booked a ticket back to India.

And on May 28th, I had this flight back to India, but Frank, who's the recruiter called me up on May 25th and said, hey, you have the offer.

So you're not going back to India. You're coming to Cloudflare.

And that was like a very exciting moment because I had never thought that I'll be getting the opportunity to work in this company.

And yeah, I definitely heard a lot about your CDN services and web application firewalls even before I had applied and before I even came to America.

So yeah. And if there's any advice that I would want to give anyone regarding applying, it's just that don't give up until the last moment and you never know what will happen, what can happen.

All you need is one person in the industry to look at your profile and go, yes, you know what?

I think this person can do what I'm expecting them to do.

And just one person to trust your skills. And so just don't give up. That's the simplest answer.

And that's the most real answer. Okay. All right. Well, I think that's interesting.

You're like, hey, look, I got my internship late in what would be a typical, it was kind of a cycle to summer internships and you were on the late side.

And I think that that's a good reminder, as you said, that companies go at different paces, teams go at different paces, and it does just take one hiring manager saying, hey, yeah, this is interesting.

Let's make it happen. And sometimes time is on your side, meaning people have more visibility a month before the summer internship starts saying, do I have budget to bring on an internship versus other teams know kind of at the beginning of the recruiting season.

So thanks for sharing that story.

I think it's really real and important. Carol, why don't you go next?

Oh, okay. Sounds good. So yeah, I've heard about Cloudflare a lot working in like SWE software engineering.

So I'd always been like aware of Cloudflare, use it like once or twice with a hackathon and then followed the blog.

And then actually, I found it through like my universities, my schools portal.

And yeah, so once I saw it there, I was like, I'll just shoot my shot and apply.

And yeah, so that was my process.

And I think I'd like to just like add as well that I know a couple of people who engaged with, like got their opportunity because they like connected with people from management online through like platforms like Twitter or something, because they'd like showcase like some projects that they worked on with Cloudflare.

And I thought that was a pretty cool way to get an internship as well.

It's like, it's not the typical pipeline, but I think it's like very effective.

I agree that it, and again, if not Twitter doesn't work for everyone or X, but if you are on it and you have a shared common interest, I do think saying back to saying, hey, what you're working on is super cool.

If you ever had a summer internship, I'm interested that sets the scene that it might happen.

There's very little downside risks to that.

Or if you contribute to open source projects and a company uses a lot of that software, I think that's also a really good avenue.

So I guess, yeah, thanks for sharing that Carol.

All right, Blaise and then Daniela, go ahead.

So I had been applying to internships at lots of different companies and lots of different roles.

I had previously interned in kind of a bank and I was looking at what else is out there.

I have absolutely no idea what I want to do post-university and I've got one year left.

And I was on Otter, which is another like platform where you can find jobs and internships.

And it's mainly for kind of tech companies.

Cloudflare came up, didn't really have any knowledge of it before. Kind of seen the little box that comes up sometimes in your own websites for verification.

But past that, didn't really know anything about it. And after doing kind of research and talking with Danny and Trang, I was like, this is a super cool opportunity.

And the interview process was far better than any other place I had interviewed for.

They actually seemed to care about what I was doing and who I was and what I wanted to bring to the table.

And it's definitely the best decision.

I had such an amazing summer. And yeah, I can't wait to see kind of what else happens.

I love that. You kind of did what I would describe as like the intern hustle.

You're like, I looked at all the boards and I tried different things that sounded interesting.

I was open to different companies and roles. I think that that works really well.

And I'm glad that you had a great experience. It makes me happy.

All right, Daniela, go ahead. Thank you. So yeah, for context, this is my first ever internship.

So I just got out of a bachelor. So yeah. Yeah, so I wasn't really experienced at all with the application process, how many interviews I would be getting.

So yeah, I was scrolling through LinkedIn, just seeing company posts.

And I threw one of the posts I actually attended an online talk arranged by Danny from the university program recruiting and two other systems engineers where I got to hear about what they do in the company, what's the company environment.

And I also looked into the job posting for the application. So that talk, that was what made me decide to apply because I really enjoyed it.

And I enjoyed it with the engineers got to talk to us about.

So yeah, my first ever, like my first technical interview was actually during my exam season.

So I was studying for an exam that was the day after my interview.

So I was going back and forth studying for my exam and doing lead code because I was really nervous and I didn't know what kind of interview it was going to be.

So yeah, but nevertheless, it was a really smooth process.

I got to meet my coordinator, my other two data team members throughout the whole process.

And so yeah, it was really a smooth process. And yeah, I really enjoyed and I'm really grateful to be here.

Oh, that's great. Love that.

That's good. Thanks for sharing that. And congratulations on having your first summer internship in the books.

Many more to come, I am sure. All right, Mathilde, and then Luis, go ahead.

My experience was actually very similar to Daniela's.

I had previously heard about Cloudflare because it's a bit hard not to come across Cloudflare at some point if you're a developer, but I didn't know much about Cloudflare as a workplace.

I didn't know anyone that worked there, so I didn't know much about it.

So there was this event at my school and there was this talk that I attended, which was given by a research manager at Cloudflare and she spoke about the internship opportunities and a bit about what Cloudflare does.

And I became really interested and just started reading the blog and just became really curious.

And then there was another happy coincidence. It was that I don't usually go to Lisbon, but there was a state that I was in Lisbon and there was an event of the Cloudflare office to celebrate Women's Empowerment Month.

And so I went there and I just met all these amazing people.

And I also met Danny. And yeah, it was amazing to just see that the Cloudflare's value really resonate with me.

And so I decided to apply. That's great. That's great. Well, it's one of the reasons why we do all those sorts of things is just to connect with people in the community and people start to see it.

And then when the right time, finding a job or a summer internship or a full-time role, it's like timing plays an important part of that is, is there a role on the team that I want at the time that I want it?

And vice versa, is this person available or interested in making move the time that I'm looking for somebody?

And so timing actually matters a lot. And so kudos to you, Matilda, for going to do some of those things beforehand to kind of say, hey, would I even be interested in this and getting to know the company?

Because then it makes it much easier saying, oh, I am.

Then you can go all in on the interview process versus sorting out the interview process.

Am I actually interested in this company at the same time?

That's a very common way to do a job, but also it's nice to get to know companies ahead of time before deciding to put your name in the hat.

So I think both ways can really work. So thanks for sharing that.

All right, Luis, go ahead. So last year, I did already know Cloudflare, like from blog posts and so forth, because it's always on the top of Reddit.

And it is such a cool company, but I wasn't aware that there was an office in Lisbon for some reason.

So in November last year, Cloudflare went to my university in the career fair and I applied almost immediately.

It took a bit of time to get to start the interview process, but it all went smoothly.

And yeah, a tip for people that want internships here or somewhere else, I think it's curiosity.

It's like if you show someone that you love the area, that you love to do side projects and so forth, I think it adds so much value to you, not only as to your resume, but as a person too, because it shows perseverance, curiosity and so many other things that I see that are important.

Yeah, curiosity, I think I agree.

So be having an open mind, being curious, being okay with not knowing all the answers and saying, okay, let's see where this leads is I think really important.

So asking the questions, having the confidence to ask the questions, all those things lead to positive outcomes.

So thanks for sharing that. Okay, let's switch totally separate gears.

So a bunch of you are finishing your internship this week, and then the rest of you are finishing your internships next week, kind of like a bunch of you are finishing your internships over the coming two weeks and some even maybe already finished up and came back for this.

But when you go back to campus, what's something that you're excited to do as soon as you get back to campus?

What's the one thing you're really looking forward to being back on campus? Meet my friends and party.

Okay, all right, perfect. That's good to see your friends.

Trade notes from the summer. All right, Daniela, go ahead. Yeah, so next year, I'll be starting a master's, I'll be changing schools.

So it will be really fun, really challenging.

Yeah, I hope it goes off. Okay, you have a new a new chapter ahead of you.

That's exciting. Well, you, you have this group to lean on to to be cheering you on.

So it's nice. All right, Blaise, go ahead. Well, I'm going into my final year of university.

So I'm graduating in June of next year. And I also go to a startup university, which is quite random.

So I'm really excited to see kind of what they're, what they're putting on this year, what the new cohort, which is only the fourth cohort, coming into the university are going to be like, and yeah, all the new modules and classes that I'll be taking.

Okay, good. You're excited to see what you're going to learn and also kind of the inner workings of how they're putting the program together, which is interesting.

All right. Well suited for the BDR ops role where you're kind of helping see the the inner workings of that too.

All right, Louise, go ahead. Actually, I have I have just finished the bachelors.

I have technically enrolled in the masters, but I'm not too sure if I'm going to do it right now.

At least I think I want to pause my studies because I'm a bit tired of it.

And then like decide what I really want. I'm probably going straight to work or maybe travel a bit to another world.

That's great. Well, I mean, to have that option is is great.

And, and I think the fact that you have your bachelor's and you can either travel or work a little bit and then go revisit your masters is a perfectly great approach to one's career.

And there's lots of different ways that once you're finished your bachelor's that people run their lives.

And so it's a lot to navigate.

So good for you. Studying is amazing. It's a huge privilege, but it is it is a lot and sometimes going to get some what I used to call real world experience that was important to me, seeing how this is actually applicable was something that I appreciate without refreshing too.

So thanks for sharing that.

All right, Rahul and Taro, how about you Rahul? Thank you, Michelle. So I'm a master student and I just have like one semester left.

It's just five credits. Don't probably get done with it and then be back to work.

So be graduating in December.

So looking forward to that. Okay, what are you excited? Okay, so you have one semester left when you go back.

What are you going to do? I mean, I'm kind of gonna I mean, I had a lot of friends who interned at different places.

So probably just chat around and see what cool stuff everyone worked on and then be done with my courses.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. You're you're excited to get it.

You're excited to be at the finish line. Like see your friends and get over the finish line.

I like that. All right, Taro, go ahead. For me, something similar. I will be graduating as well in May for my bachelor's program and will hopefully want to be applying all my real world experience, like you said, of my past internships and this one and job hunt and look for a workplace for my final, you know, for my last year.

And hopefully Cloudflare will be in in one of those groups.

So fingers crossed. That's great. Well, yes, of course, we love hearing that looking for a full time role is a lot bigger of a decision than where to spend a summer internship.

And so yes, please, we definitely are hiring at Cloudflare. So so we can chat about that offline.

But yes, we wish you all luck on on on that journey.

All right, Nikhil, go ahead. Yeah, so I'll be going back to New York to continue grad school, finish out.

And on a personal note, I'm looking forward to having pizza again after four months away from New York, seeing some friends.

And then in addition to classes, I'll be doing some work with an early stage seed and precede fund.

So I'm really excited to try and activate that part of my brain that's not just about coding, but also looking at companies in the AI infrastructure space as well.

It's interesting. That's great. Thanks for sharing that. Food is an important one for where you live.

Everyone has a favorite, favorite place where on campus and or near campus.

So pizza clearly is yours. Thanks, Nikhil. New York pizza is pretty good.

All right, Billy, your turn. So next week, I'll be back in my research lab, resuming my PhD.

I think what you said about the real world experience, the industry experience is actually very important.

It actually happens that I overlap my research overlaps with what we do at Cloudflare for web security.

So I think I can actually use some of the things that I learned from the product development perspective from the industry.

You know, how do we solve such solutions on scale and those kinds of things?

So I'm excited to look into that. That's good.

That's great. I love that. You're like you're going to use your summer internship experience to maybe have even more of an impact on your PhD research that you're studying.

I think that feels really good and tangible and effective.

So that's great. Thanks for sharing that. All right, Carol, close us out on this one.

And then we're going to the last question because we're at the last four and a half minutes.

The hour flew by because all of you are so interesting.

But Carol, go ahead. Sounds good. I just have a bullet pointed list. Number one, I'm looking forward to a course that some of my friends are going to be doing a project in and we're just like customizing it.

So that's like a really exciting project that I've like look forward to developing.

Two, the food, like Nikhil mentioned.

And number three, I'm actually kind of really missing snow. It's been a while since I've been back to Canada for a while.

So I don't know. I'm just kind of looking forward to the winter.

There we go. That was not on the bingo card today, but that's a good let's see the four seasons, four seasons for the win.

Tara saying no, I'm not looking forward to the snow. But again, that's what makes the world go around.

People have different likes and dislikes and tastes.

So I'm also Canadian. I also love the snow, although I currently live in California where I don't see it very often.

So anyway, thank you so much for sharing all that.

Okay. So we're down to the last few minutes and just, I mean, what I'd love to end on is just again, thank you everyone for sharing so much of your experiences, but any words, words of advice for other summer interns or college students, university students thinking about what they want to do next in their career.

Any words of advice that we haven't brought up today that you kind of want to share with somebody who's thinking about applying for their first internship or trying to figure out what to do with their career or something that hasn't been said today.

We have a few minutes to go through that. Go ahead, Blaise. Just apply, like apply to things that even if you don't think necessarily that you might be kind of qualified for, I know it's a little bit different for internships, but I think a lot of the time women in general, and it has come out that women in general don't apply to things unless they meet like 80, 90% of the requirements for roles.

And men are closer to like 40 or 50%. So I think it's just apply whether or not you think you are fully qualified for something.

You never know how your personality shines or what you actually do know can shine in interviews or whatever.

So just apply to things and see kind of what sticks.

I love that. Your name will never get pulled if the name's not even in the hat.

So you got to put your name in the hat and it might get pulled.

So I think that's a really good one, Blaise. Thank you for starting with that.

Tara, go ahead. Yeah, my piece of advice is that the significance of impact at your company.

I know a lot of people apply to a lot of big organizations, small organizations.

And I think one of the biggest things in your four months, very short period or 12 months of an internship is where, which company will offer you the highest, you to do the highest impact.

Like for me, I was able to push a product, add a feature to push a product to GE.

And I know a lot of other interns were able to work on things like that.

And I think that's very important to prioritize companies that allow you to do that.

Well, I think that just to build off that, because when you go look for a real job, they, people want to know, tell me what you've worked on and be able to say, Hey, I built this.

That was part of this, that drove these business results is a really good answer compared to one where, well, I've never, I've never been part of shipping anything.

It's just feels it's a, it's a, it does give you a leg up when you start to go look at, and you personally learn a lot too.

So I think that's super great.

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. All right. So apply, look at what you're applying to and say, Hey, what are you, where are you going to learn the most and have the biggest impact?

Are you gonna get your hands dirty? Are you actually gonna be able to roll up your sleeves and, and actually like do the work or you're just doing a piece of it.

So I think that those are two really good pieces of advice. Billy take us home.

I think we have time for maybe one more. Go ahead. I think it kind of makes sense to be the last one.

Talk to people, ask around. I was, I was in an excellent position.

I had friends who either were or are at GladFlair. Ask people about the company, ask them, you know, how is the environment?

Do you, is it open?

Is it strict? How do you work? How is, is it remote? Is it on location? So just talk with people and get their perspective.

You'll probably get a lot out of it more than you can get from just, you know, a single sheet of a job description.

Oh my gosh, such a good one.

We can't forget about the, don't take the people out of work where it's ask people, people want to help be helpful to students.

And I think all of you have email addresses that end with a .edu because you're university or college students and people want to help.

We were, everyone was a college university student at one point and they want to help the next generation.

And so reach out and say, Hey, what do you like about this?

I'm looking for this. I think that you'd be surprised at how many responses you get.

So, all right. The 13 of you, thank you so much for spending your summers at GladFlair.

Thank you for so much for spending the last hour sharing all these insights.

I learned a lot. I had a lot of fun.

And so, and thank you everyone for tuning in. I wish all of you the best, and I can't wait to see what you all do with your career.

So thanks everyone.

Until next time. Bye.