one week before hack the north, td bank reached out for an onsite interview. a phone call monday, confirmation thursday, interview 6pm saturday—right in the middle of the hackathon. i'd been applying since summer 2024 with nothing to show; this was my first real interview. it felt more like a conversation than an evaluation, and sunday afternoon they called with the offer. i blanked and said thanks.

the resume and the timing mattered—hack the north showed i was building. so did showing up: volunteer, hacker, mentor, judge, cross-enrolling at waterloo just to get to more hackathons. no prizes, but a lot of rejections and a lot of shipping. if you keep building and stay authentic, eventually the pieces fall into place. this is my first real internship, and that's the playbook that got me here.

first day was the intern event. met a bunch of cool people like victor, maurya, and luke, got set up with the laptop, badges, the whole spiel, and even a headshot. i work out of td terrace on the 14th floor, so the view was a nice bonus while everything got rolling.

the team was credit origination and funding, so the work lived right where customer intent becomes real money movement. a typical day was tracing flows, spotting where latency hides, and tightening handoffs so approvals feel instant without sacrificing risk controls.

the core of it: building systems for in-branch employees to process and fund customer applications for credit products like mortgages, credit cards, loans, and lines of credit.

team setup was a scrum master, a po, 3 devs, and 2 qe’s, so standups were tight and everything moved fast.

i spent a good chunk of time refactoring legacy code and cleaning up old flows so new changes didn’t feel brittle.

the main work was command pattern removal—going through the codebase, identifying where the old pattern was used, and refactoring it out cleanly without breaking anything downstream. not glamorous, but it taught me a lot about how large systems are structured and why certain decisions age poorly.

midway through, i found myself with some bandwidth and asked my manager if there was more i could pick up. he handed me a proof of concept: migrate an old tech stack to a newer one. i got it working end-to-end—connected the db, tested the flows, leaned on copilot to accelerate the migration. wrote thorough documentation so the work could actually be handed off. presented it to my pod, got good feedback. next up is a science fair-style showcase where i'll present it to a wider audience across teams.

my tech lead and i happened to catch the same train home most days. those commutes were probably the most valuable 20 minutes of my week. he'd talk about java—why it still matters, what advanced concepts actually show up in production, and why understanding the language deeply is what separates good engineers from great ones. the kind of context you don't get from tickets.

there was a townhall session for interns—five mentors, different backgrounds, open q&a. hearing how different people found their path in tech and what they'd do differently was a good reminder that there's no single way to build a career. i left with a few questions answered and a few more opened up.