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Tag: internship

August 6, 2024

Two Sides of the Desk: An Intern-Mentor Journey ft. Prajwal and Minal at Mercari India

Welcome to Two Sides of the Desk, a blog series where we share the unique experiences, challenges, and triumphs of interns and their mentors. This blog explores the dynamic relationship between mentor and mentee, offering insights from both sides of the desk. Whether you’re a seasoned mentor, a budding intern, or simply curious about the mentorship journey, our stories and reflections aim to inspire, educate, and foster a deeper understanding of this transformative partnership. Mercari India: How do you approach balancing guidance and autonomy for your interns to ensure they’re both learning and contributing meaningfully to projects? Prajwal: Balancing guidance and autonomy involves setting a solid foundation with clear expectations, equipping interns with the right set of tools and resources, providing structured support, and gradually increasing autonomy as interns grow more confident and capable. Regular communication and feedback are key to ensuring they are both learning and contributing meaningfully to projects. Mercari India: Can you provide an example of a particularly challenging situation you’ve encountered while mentoring an intern, and how you navigated it to ensure their growth and success? Prajwal: Introducing the codebase was challenging given its size, structure, and complexity. To avoid overwhelming the intern with technical jargon, I decided to present an eagle’s eye view of the codebase instead of navigating file by file. I sliced the codebase into blocks of predefined functionalities. To reinforce her understanding, I recommended she explore a recently built feature that was a fresh implementation and less entangled with the rest of the codebase. This approach set her perspective on the outline of the end-to-end logical structure of a given screen. This atomic exploration enabled her to understand the composition of the rest of the app by inference and led her to successfully complete her first business KR with minimal supervision. Mercari… <a class="more-link" href="https://about.in.mercari.com/news/intern-series/two-sides-of-the-desk-an-intern-mentor-journey-ft-prajwal-and-minal-at-mercari-india/">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Two Sides of the Desk: An Intern-Mentor Journey ft. Prajwal and Minal at Mercari India</span></a>

June 12, 2024

Two Sides of the Desk: An Intern-Mentor Journey ft. Paras and Nikita at Mercari India

Welcome to Two Sides of the Desk, a blog series where we share the unique experiences, challenges, and triumphs of interns and their mentors. This blog explores the dynamic relationship between mentor and mentee, offering insights from both sides of the desk. Whether you’re a seasoned mentor, a budding intern, or simply curious about the mentorship journey, our stories and reflections aim to inspire, educate, and foster a deeper understanding of this transformative partnership. Mercari India:  How do you approach balancing guidance and autonomy for your interns to ensure they’re both learning and contributing meaningfully to projects? Paras: As a mentor, I prioritize a balanced blend of guidance and autonomy to effectively nurture interns’ growth. Thorough onboarding is crucial, introducing them to our systems and pairing them with experienced team members for initial tasks, ensuring seamless integration into our workflow. Early establishment of clear and achievable goals aligns their learning objectives with meaningful contributions to our projects. Beginning with structured assignments, I gradually foster their autonomy as their skills develop.Regular check-ins and constructive feedback sessions are crucial in assisting interns to tackle challenges independently while refining their problem-solving abilities. Collaborative projects play a vital role in providing insights into system interactions and leveraging the collective knowledge of the team. An open-door policy is maintained to encourage questions, facilitate idea sharing, and cultivate a supportive environment where interns can thrive and effectively prepare for future responsibilities. Mercari India:  Can you provide an example of a particularly challenging situation you’ve encountered while mentoring an intern, and how you navigated it to ensure their growth and success? Paras: In mentoring Nikita through her journey into backend development, we embarked on a project exploring server-side logic and API development. Initially, Nikita felt a mix of excitement and uncertainty, but I reassured her that growth… <a class="more-link" href="https://about.in.mercari.com/news/two-sides-of-the-desk-an-intern-mentor-journey-ft-paras-and-nikita-at-mercari-india/">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Two Sides of the Desk: An Intern-Mentor Journey ft. Paras and Nikita at Mercari India</span></a>

April 10, 2024

Mentoring the Future: My Experience with Build@Mercari Program

Hello everyone, I’m Sanu Satyadarshi, currently serving as a Lead Software Engineer at Mercari. Recently, I had the privilege of being a mentor for the Build@Mercari 2024 program, and I’m excited to share my experiences from this incredible event. Build@Mercari stands as Mercari Inc.’s premier pre-internship initiative, offering online training and internship opportunities to university students worldwide. This immersive program provides hands-on training, allowing students to dive into the tech stack commonly used in the industry. Selected participants are grouped into teams, with each team being assigned 1-2 mentors. Throughout the program, students undergo comprehensive training covering essential skills such as Git, GoLang/Python, Web API development, Docker, CI/CD, and more. This year, the event commenced on Feb 16, 2024, accommodating both online and offline formats. Online sessions catered to English-speaking students, while offline sessions were tailored for Japanese-speaking students. I had the privilege of mentoring the English-speaking group (while still honing my Japanese language skills 😞). Our initial session focused on assisting students in installing and setting up Git, a fundamental skill for any Software Engineer. Following this, students were divided into smaller groups, with dedicated mentors assigned to each team. The experience was incredibly engaging. We began by configuring our development environments, setting up Golang/Python on our laptops, and deploying a sample web application to showcase the iconic “Hello World!” message on our browsers. As the Build@Mercari sessions emphasize technical proficiency, I volunteered to lead sessions on Docker and CI, in addition to the introductory GoLang session. During the Docker session, I introduced the concept of containers, followed by a demonstration and hands-on exercise on containerizing a GoLang application. Students successfully created containerized applications and executed them on their laptops. In the CI session, we utilized GitHub actions to automate the building of Docker images upon each PR merge, highlighting… <a class="more-link" href="https://about.in.mercari.com/news/engineeringblog/mentoring-the-future-my-experience-with-buildmercari-program/">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Mentoring the Future: My Experience with Build@Mercari Program</span></a>

July 18, 2023

Mercari India – Software Engineer Intern Experience

Hi, My name is Thari Zephaniah. I had the incredible opportunity to be one of the first Software Engineer Interns hired by Mercari India. In this post, I will be taking you through my entire journey, starting from the initial interview process all the way to receiving a Pre-Placement Offer (PPO). Motivation To tell you a little bit about the company, Mercari is an e-Commerce company where users can buy and sell products. Since my sophomore year, I’ve been keen on Mercari. It has grown into Japan’s largest community-powered marketplace, with more than 250 billion yen GMV in the 3Q of 2023. It quickly became an aspirational company due to the positive feedback and highly commendable experiences shared by my seniors who Interned at Mercari, Japan. Internship Application One usual day in November, while engrossed in my routine LinkedIn browsing, I stumbled across an announcement from Mercari India: They were hiring Software Engineer Interns. A surge of excitement washed over me. This was it – the moment I had been eagerly waiting for! Taking into account my previous application experience with Mercari Japan, where I was, unfortunately, unable to progress beyond the second round, I was determined to present the best version of myself this time, I got my resume reviewed by one of my seniors to enhance my chances. Equipped with their constructive feedback, I was ready to put my best foot forward.  I approached the application process via a referral, confident of the personal touch it would echo in my candidature. This whole process began in November, and patience became my close companion as the process took somewhat longer than anticipated. This delay was because of the fact that the HR setup wasn’t still consolidated in India during the internship opening, leaving the Japan team to manage the… <a class="more-link" href="https://about.in.mercari.com/news/blog/mercari-india-software-engineer-intern-experience/">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Mercari India – Software Engineer Intern Experience</span></a>