My time at Amazon Robotics began with a day of intros, an orientation, and a pizza party. Upon our arrival, we were greeted by our managers and spent the morning with other new hires and interns learning about Amazon as a whole and the company’s operations. We took a tour of the facility and by lunch time our managers brought us downstairs to meet the team. We were met with pizza and snacks.
Our first week consisted of familiarizing ourselves with the team’s day to day operations and assisting whenever we could. On day one, we helped test the item stowing system. We acted as if we were stowers at an Amazon warehouse and put the system through its paces. Later that week, we assisted in the testing of various types of warehouse sorting technology that were in development. We fed packages through the system and watched for any errors. We also spent time building test stations and new floors. Through these hands on experiences, we gained a new understanding of the cutting edge technology behind the e-commerce giant.
Soon, my co-intern Jack and I were assigned a project of our own to work on in our free time throughout the rest of the summer. Our team had an internal website containing all the test tools that had been created to make their testing more efficient. Our job was to completely redesign the website and overhaul the user interface. Additionally, we needed to add new test tools to the site. The first step was meeting with the Amazon Robotics senior UI designer to discuss and decide on changes to the website’s UI that would be most impactful. From there, we began working to implement these changes. Though inexperienced with web development programming languages such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, we picked them up as we went along with the help of a few mentors. One of our main focuses was creating collapsible sections that could hold each tool in order to tidy up each page and reduce clutter. Also, we worked to create a search page that allowed members of the Amazon Robotics QA team to find specific tools more easily.
As the days count down to the end of the internship, I want to say thank you to everyone who made this possible. My internship at Amazon Robotics was an unforgettable experience and one that will continue to impact me for years to come.