This past summer (Spring 2020) I got the privilege of working for TD at their Student Innovation Lab. This term started off a little wild and had many struggles pertaining to COVID and remote work, but I am glad how everything turned out in the end.
The spring started with a whirlwind of co-op confusion. I had received a couple of offers at the end of WaterlooWorks’ main round and was excited to have some options about how to spend my next four months. After a bunch of deliberation, I decided to pursue an international co-op experience in Bonn, Germany with Elastic.io. Only a short while after accepting my offer COVID-19 devastated the world and left me without a job. I had to quickly scramble to try and find something. I reached out to TD, who had offered me a position in the main round, to see if they would take me on board for the summer. They had already filled all of their co-op positions for the term but thankfully and luckily for me they were willing to make an exception.
Now, with a job lined up, I finished up the school term online with several painful 4-hour exams. During this exam cycle, I got the unfortunate news that TD would be pushing the co-op start date and I wouldn’t be able to start work until June 1st. So, once my exams wrapped up I had 6 weeks to stay at home and do whatever I wanted. I tried to fill my time with productive work but in the end, I was most proud of the catching up I did on my Netflix List. I also got a cute new puppy named Mezzo in March so I spent lots of time cuddling and training her. During this time I did manage to update my web and mail servers and I started to work on some Arduino projects. I got started on developing a sliding doggy door that would open up with a Google Assistant command or a dog proximity sensor and I started to work with the UWaterloo Midnight Sun Solar Car Club.
Once work started remote on the 1st of June I was quickly thrown into the thick of things. The Lab, located in Communitech, is TD’s small Digital Solutions branch that focuses on developing banking solutions for their student clientele: “For students by students”. The team was comprised of 7 interns, 7 full-time workers (both dev & design), and one manger. It is a tradition at the Lab to start and end each work term with a Hackathon. Although I am not able to say what we did for these projects, I can definitely say they were the most exciting and memorable parts of the term. I was able to get experience with my first high-pace, high-pressure hackathon atmosphere and get closer to the other co-ops.
Although remote work provided many challenges and frustrations, the Lab did a good job of trying to keep us connected with many no-work meetings filled with Skribl.io, weekly coffee chats and daily check-ins. For most of the term, I was working closely with my mentor and another full-timer on the Lab’s top-secret financial app. We had to redevelop large parts of the code to compile with TD’s risk appetite, developed new features to enhance the user experience and developed better ways to aggregate data from multiple sources.
Over the course of the term, I was able to greatly improve my Flutter and dart skills and I was able to make some strong connections with the colleagues I was working with. The experience I gained during this co-op has already bore fruit as I was recruited by a local startup called Social Kindred to be their lead mobile developer in Flutter. The term ended with a challenge to design the traditional Lab term t-shirt. I choose to embrace the Work-From-Home theme of the summer and designed a minimalistic logo that won the competition. I look forward to getting the shirts in a couple of weeks!
