During a hot Pittsburgh summer, I found myself sitting in the underground lab of CMU’s Gates Computer Center, staring at the blinking code on my screen. My “Introduction to Algorithms” book was dog-eared, and my coffee mug had a thick layer of stains at the bottom. I had no idea that in just three months, I’d be standing under Amazon's iconic glass dome, "The Spheres," in Seattle, signing a return offer.
One of the most memorable moments of my application process was the unexpected challenge. I was in the middle of Amazon’s online coding test when the CMU campus network crashed. I grabbed my laptop and ran to the nearest café. With the WiFi barely working, I completed the last two algorithm questions by hand, using pen and paper. My interviewer later told me that it was those scribbled pseudocode notes on napkins, stained with coffee cup rings, that made him recognize my ability to solve problems under pressure. Those napkins, marked with coffee stains, became the most real part of my application.
On the first day of the internship, I was hit with the work culture shock. My badge wasn’t even activated yet when I was pulled into an emergency meeting about EC2 instance scheduling. The whiteboard was full of internal terms I didn’t understand. I secretly took a photo of it, then later spent the night going through CMU’s distributed systems materials to figure it out. The following week, I volunteered to visit the data center to see things firsthand. In the loud, buzzing environment of the servers, I finally grasped the physical meaning behind the abstract technical concepts.
A turning point came in the seventh week of my internship. The team was planning capacity for Prime Day, and I noticed that the forecast model kept underestimating the load in certain regions. After going through the logs and finding nothing, I had an idea and checked the local weather forecast. It turned out that the model hadn’t accounted for heatwaves, which were increasing the number of household users. This discovery, though simple, led the team to adjust the scaling strategy overnight. At 4 AM, when I walked out of the office, I saw my breath in the rare Seattle fog, and I finally understood what “customer obsession” really meant.
When I received my return offer, my mentor gave me a gift: the system architecture diagram I had drawn on my first day, full of mistakes, and the drafts of all my weekly reports that he had quietly saved. These pages, full of corrections, told the story of how I grew from uncertain to confident. They now hang on my dorm wall at CMU, more valuable than any certificate or award.
Now, back in Pittsburgh, working late at the Tepper Library, I often think of the heated technical discussions in Amazon’s conference rooms. CMU taught me how to write clean code, but Amazon taught me how that code impacts the real world—changing the way people shop, watch videos, and do business. Every time I walk past the cherry blossom trees on campus, I remind myself: the best tech stories happen when algorithms meet real life.
Release time:2025-04-27
