Summer Intern season started a few weeks ago, and my internship is about to begin tomorrow. I’m going to return with Facebook for another summer. The main difference with my past internships is basically that this time everything has changed.
The road trip I had
When my 2019 internship ended, I requested to intern in the New York office. I was really excited to visit this city that thanks to movies and shows, it is basically “the dream” city. I made plans, and even a friend told me he was going to crash in my apartment during the summer. I was so excited!
A few months past and the COVID era started, I was hoping that nothing would change. It was going to be difficult, but maybe the virus wasn’t going to be that bad, and, oh god, I was so wrong. Worldwide this virus was declared a pandemic, travels where banned, and NY became the city with the most cases worldwide.
All this really hit me when I received the email from the US. Visa service here in Mexico:
That march 18th date was the date of my appointment, so I was so close, but I wasn’t able to get the Visa before everything started to shut down in my country. I was worried, but I hoped everything would be ok by the time I started.
I was getting worried and started to look out for information about what was happening with other companies. I found the @Hiring2020 twitter, which basically was updating the state of internships. There was no new information about Facebook. The company was really informative (and slow) on how they were assessing the situation, but it was interesting to know how others were doing.
A month passed since my not obtained Visa, and I received the email from my recruiter telling me we were moving completely remotely for internships, and they were going to allow me to work from Mexico.
Remote internship situation
I was relieved that my internship was going to be respected and not canceled as many others I saw online. But at the same time, I was sad (I still am a little). I had these exciting plans for the summer, and now I will need to stay at home because of the quarantine. But this isn’t the end of the world (I think, I hope) and I’m going to have other opportunities to travel.
After the notification I would be working remotely, I started to do all the paperwork needed to work in my country (this is the first time I work here in Mexico). And besides that, there wasn’t that much for me to do in the meanwhile besides waiting.
But I wasn’t just waiting for the start of the internship, but also for the equipment they would be sending me to work. After hearing of the remote internship, this wait for the equipment has been the most stressful part, simply because they said it would arrive in the best of cases 2 weeks before, on the worst scenario during the week before the first day. Tomorrow I start, and I just received the tracking information, and it’s expected to arrive tomorrow.
So yeah, tomorrow is my first day of internship. I hope my equipment arrives on time for me to start doing something, if not, a friend of mine told me they just move my start date to the next week, so it’s not that bad.
I decided to write this post as the start of a small journal of my experience as a remote intern this summer. I hope to be writing more in the next days (weeks).
