A Typical Day as an Intern in the Engineering Development Group

I first interned with the Engineering Development Group (EDG) at MathWorks in Cambridge, UK, in 2022 and enjoyed it so much that I returned for a second year during my university break. Both internships offered me opportunities to build a network of supportive mentors and develop my programming skills in a corporate setting.

Here’s a typical day during one of my internships:

8:30 a.m. I grab breakfast with a group of other interns. Today we’re not talking much because it’s pancake day—yum!

9:00 a.m. I ate the optimal number of pancakes; my brain is ready to work. I sit down at my desk and start working on my project. I sent some of my code to the development server yesterday and it looks like the build failed overnight. Time to dig back into the code.

9:30 a.m. Time for our daily team catch-up. During catch-ups, team members meet virtually and discuss ongoing projects, achievements, and upcoming events. I identify someone whose current project would complement mine and make a mental note to reach out to them later.

10:00 a.m. I return my focus to a new feature I’ve been working on. My aim is to enable communication between a quantum computer and MATLAB to allow MathWorks customers to solve hard optimisation problems.

After looking at my system design, which went through several iterations during the first few weeks of my internship, I start putting some code together. Next, I write my unit tests and verify that everything is working as intended.

Noon I realise that two hours have passed since I last looked up from my computer and I’m starving! I have a quick snack and head out for my break. There’s a MathWorks running club that meets at lunchtime, but today I’m going to do some calisthenics at the nearby park.

1:00 p.m. Showered and fueled, I get back to work. I’m hoping to finish off this block of code before joining an intern social event at 2:30. I continue to work on the code I wrote this morning. Some tests aren’t passing and I can’t figure out why. Luckily, my mentor is only one message away and I quickly get an explanation for why I’m seeing all the errors.

I think the code is ready. Time to send it out for review to my mentor as well as a few quality engineers and documentation writers.

2:30 p.m. I cycle over to the river with a group of interns. We’re all going on a river punting treasure hunt with other EDG team members. It’s starting to rain, but we’re going to stick it out and hope for the best.

4:30 p.m. While away, I received some feedback on my code. Everyone seems happy with my proposed changes, and I get the “Ship it” signal from the team. The code is ready to be sent to our customers.

5:30 p.m. All the interns head to a nearby pub for some well-deserved burgers.

Cambridge—with lots of things to do—has been so nice to relocate to over the summer. This internship was a great introduction to my possible life after university.

I have since joined MathWorks as an employee and am thoroughly enjoying my time with EDG. Both internships prepared me well to join the team and gave me invaluable insights into the tools and processes we use to deliver quality products to customers.