Welcome to Cisco! My three-month internship at Cisco concluded a couple of months ago and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experience there. For me, work has been a source of great enjoyment and learning, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and at a climax of racial tensions across the United States. Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to flex my brain muscles with interesting projects and responsibilities this summer. The time has absolutely flown by, and I’ll break down my thoughts about working at Cisco as well as what I am looking forward to in the future.

My family lives in Fremont, CA which is less than 15 minutes from the headquarters of Cisco in San Jose. When I first received my offer, I was so excited to be able to commute daily into the office and live at home with my family. I could get lunch with my brother who worked nearby and get to know all of my coworkers. Safe to say those plans met a brick wall when I found out that we were shifting to a permanently virtual internship. No one was allowed into the offices anymore until further notice to reduce the spread of the virus.

I went through the process of remote onboarding with a laptop and equipment that was shipped to my home, a stone’s throw from the offices. My mentor Kai and my manager Satyavrat made me feel so welcomed and part of the team. They made me feel heard and picked my internship projects based on my interests.

I started working on an internal debugging tool that could help identify the reason for dropped audio on Webex Teams calls. I loved working on a project that was so timely and beneficial to help connect people during the global pandemic. Usage of our product shot through the roof as everyone adjusted to the remote lifestyle. Being able to debug the dropped audio and improve the user experience was deeply impactful work and I was thrilled to contribute to it.

One particularly memorable day was when my team found out that Australia’s entire school system would be switching to Webex Teams. In a matter of days, we would be adding millions of new users! Millions of students would need a reliable service to attend class, hang out with their friends, and meet with their teachers.

As we onboarded more and more users at the start of the pandemic, it was clear that Webex Teams would need to seriously beef up our backend services to meet the demand. My team was spending millions of dollars in Amazon Web Services (AWS) fees every month to host our product and handle the traffic. When I joined the team in the summer, I expressed my interest in managing those AWS resources and finding a way to reduce the astronomical costs. I brainstormed a dozen different solutions and brought them to my team for their feedback. I went through multiple rounds of feedback with our team and partner teams based in London. In addition to my responsibilities with the audio debugging, I was given free rein to build a proof of concept and deploy it on a test cluster.

By the end of the summer, I delivered a completed audio debug tool as well as a machine learning-based auto scaler for AWS. For good measure, I also built out some dashboards to track global customer usage metrics across regions. I worked extremely hard all summer and I am very proud of the work I managed to produce. It took immense support from my mentor, manager, and coworkers who shared their advice and support throughout the summer. I am very grateful to them all for their guidance.

I learned so much this summer and I would love to continue my work at Cisco in the future. I recognize the impact that scalable software services can have on the world. Code that is built on my laptop can immediately get deployed to millions of users around the world. It can greatly improve the quality of a product experience, especially one that is crucial in a time of need. That level of impact is unparalleled. I will prioritize having that level of impact in my future career choices very highly.