The best learning experiences are hands-on experiences. That’s why at AppDynamics we invest so heavily in our summer internship program. We feel it’s important that college students and postgraduate students have opportunities to grow and expand.
This year we are fortunate to have 14 interns spending their summer with us. Their backgrounds include product management, software engineering, legal, sales, and customer success. So far their projects have had a positive impact on both our company as well as our community.
In this post we’ll look at some of the community activities our interns have participated in and some of the team building activities we kicked our summer off with to bring teams together! We’re sure some of these ideas will be useful to any other teams out there considering internship programs or brainstorming ideas for team activities.
Team building: Bay Voyager
As the interns started to arrive for their summer program, we wanted to break the ice to foster an environment of fun and trust. We enjoyed a beautiful cruise in the San Francisco bay on the Bay Voyager. We were incredibly lucky to have a sunny day on the water, lots of sea animal sightings, and great conversations about what was to come. What a great way to start the summer.
Volunteering: Glide Memorial Church
As a San Francisco-based company, we wanted our interns to give back to the community we call home. We made our way to Glide Memorial Church and served over 560 dinners to needy individuals and families. Glide Memorial serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner 364 days a year with an average of 2,000 meals per day. The team had a great experience meeting members of the community and better understanding their needs.
Volunteering: Year Up
Year Up is a nonprofit that seeks to close the opportunity divide by providing low-income young adults with the skills, experience, and support to empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. Our interns spent the afternoon helping Year Up students come up with and pitch a product idea (think Shark Tank). A panel of AppDynamics employees watched Year Up students and their intern mentors pitch products, give feedback, and decide on winners.
Leadership: Lean In
Our interns joined forces with other local interns to create and moderate a Lean In Circle, hosted at the AppDynamics office. Joan Hong and Shivani Mall partnered to create an environment where meaningful discussion and personal thoughts on leadership, empowerment, and insecurities could be shared. These Circles enable interns to meet each other, develop a network, and discuss issues surrounding women and diversity in the tech industry.
In our next post, we’ll share more details on the structure of our program, our goals for success, and some of the most significant outcomes we’ve seen from our interns this summer.
If you’re interested in technical and nontechnical internships, please check out our careers page in September for 2017-2018 openings — https://www.appdynamics.com/company/careers/
Don’t forget to check back in a couple weeks for more details on our summer internship program!
