Three Things I Learned as a Remote Intern
By: Raga Murali
Tags: Intern, Remote Working, Learning, PayPal

When I got an internship offer from Braintree, I was really excited to come and work in Texas. I’d never been in the southern part of the United States, let alone Texas. I was hoping to meet many new people, explore the State Capitol, visit museums, go on bike tours, see the botanical gardens, etc. However, all my excitement came crashing down when I found out that I was going to be working remotely.

Although I was assured the PayPal University Recruiting Team was hard at work making sure the transition from in-person to remote would be seamless, I couldn’t help but wonder: will the experience be the same? How am I going to form friendships or have any sort of relationship with my coworkers? Will I be able to learn effectively?

Fortunately, my worries were put to rest within a couple of months of working at PayPal. Here’s what I learned about PayPal and its culture working remotely.

1) PayPal has a variety of resources for learning

My team, Payment Experiences, was working with Ruby, Vim, Tmux, and Cpairs, which were all unfamiliar tools to me. I had access to LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and O’Reilly, which helped me learn essential skills for my job. Also, these tools came in handy for open-dev day. Open-dev day is a day dedicated every other week for employees to learn anything they would like.

Although I learned a lot with these resources, I often found that I learned more by talking to people. Every week, we could sign up for intern meetups in which we would be paired with another intern to chat with. I learned about more parts of the company by talking to other interns. They often guided me to other resources that I could use for additional assistance.

2) Your team wants you to succeed

Every week I had check-ins with both my mentor and manager. I learned valuable skills from both of them on a variety of topics, including how to navigate through code, review PRs, and contribute to discussions. I was also paired with a trail guide dedicated to helping me ramp up on the different apps our team uses and the tools used to debug for the first half of my internship. On top of this, when I had questions, my questions were answered quickly, team members gave me effective feedback, and every single member of my team helped me get closer to my academic goals.

3) PayPal is dedicated to listening to your concerns.

Every month we have a meeting in which we anonymously write about things that we’re happy, sad, and mad about. After doing this, all of the members can see what’s been written on different notecards, and we all get to vote on which notecards we’d like to talk about.

During one of those meetings, someone wrote they wanted to improve the diversity on our team. I was happy to see many people on our team contribute to the discussion. Today I’m proud to say my team is made up of 18 people from over 10 states and 3 continents.

I had an experience that exceeded my expectations. I’m so grateful for all the friendships I’ve made, the people I’ve learned from, and the opportunity to work at one of the leading tech companies supporting online payments.

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