Class of 2019 Interns: Summer in Review

As summer comes to a close, our interns are preparing for their fall schedules and heading back to university. Below our Class of 2019 interns are sharing their highlights from their time at Five9:

Nadia: Project Management Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: Leading meetings has been one of the most beneficial experiences during my internship here because I have been able to take ownership of meaningful work that affects the company and improve on my professional communication skills.

Main Projects: I am really excited that one of my deliverables is automating Rally and Jira data into Domo because it will save people a lot of time when they need to be updated on the state of feature completion for example, or identifying existing defects in production, and it will be used at the company after I leave!

Key Takeaway: For me, the biggest take away from this internship has been learning about what it’s like to work at a fast growing and innovative company. Since I’ve been here, people have been hired on almost every week and even my immediate team has expanded. I’ve also really liked learning about how the tools we learn how to use in my computer science classes, such as Jira, are actually used in industry.

Leon: Product Management Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: The intern training sessions are most beneficial for me. It was extremely helpful to learn about the Five9 culture, workflow, and how different teams work together. In addition to that, I also learned a lot more about career development and managing interactions within the office workspace.

Main Projects: I’m working on researching and prototyping a smartwatch application for ADP and Sup+. Since I’m taking charge of this project, my roles are to research the needs and most important information customers need and prototype an innovative solution to complement their workflow both at and away from the desk. 

Key Takeaways: My biggest takeaway is that communication is key. I’m very happy to see that the entire product team communicates very clearly what they want and need to accomplish every week. It gives clear direction and a visual goal so no one is lost in their work. 

Morgan: Integrated Marketing Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: The most beneficial experience for me so far was being able to attend CCW in Las Vegas. It was awesome to get real trade show experience and to participate in all the aspects that go into planning such a large event.

Main Projects: The main projects I assisted with were CCW Vegas and the Eastern Regional Sales Summit. In addition, I had the opportunity to sit down with every team in the marketing department to learn more about what they do and how we could create more efficient processes when planning events with the various teams within the marketing department.

Key Takeaway: My biggest takeaway was gaining an understanding of the various aspects that go into planning large tradeshows and company events. I enjoyed learning the strategic insights that contribute to having a successful marketing event. I also discovered what a great company culture Five9 has ad how it provided a welcoming place to learn throughout the summer.

Eric: Engineering Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: The HR team has done great work preparing events for the interns that are both fun and professionally helpful. My favorite event so far has been the fireside chat with our CEO. Rowan has an interesting background that I certainly didn’t expect. Hearing his story and getting advice from him was very valuable and I hope to apply his lessons to my own career.

Main Projects: I’ve been working on testing suite for dataflow jobs. I created some developer tools to help with anyone using Google Cloud Pubsub and Bigtable, and wrote cucumber tests to ensure proper dataflow between the two.

Key Takeaway: I think some takeaways for me are don’t be afraid to ask for help, and don’t tunnel vision on your work and neglect your relationships with fellow coworkers.

Emmet: Creative Studio Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: I think the ability to work on a wide range of projects has been very beneficial. From branding, social ads, packaging, signage, and website assets, I’ve been able to experience and get a glimpse on everything that goes into in-house marketing. 

Main Projects: My favorite and the most interesting projects for me have been a motion graphic ad, Thursdays In The Cloud branding, rebrand eBook illustrations, signage and environmental design for SF conference rooms. 

Key Takeaway: One of the biggest takeaways from my time here has been seeing the inner workings of how a marketing department functions and all that does into an in-house creative team.

Priyanka: Engineering Intern

Most Beneficial Experience: The most beneficial experience so far has been seeing what it’s like to be involved in the production of a product. I’ve been able to see what it takes to get together different people from different backgrounds and teams to make an idea come to life.

Main Projects: My project for the summer involves analyzing agent-customer conversations using speech recognition and natural language processing to capture information that will provide guidance to assist agents.

Key Takeaway: The interesting thing about AI is that the space of possible solutions is endless. There are applications of AI in pretty much every industry. The fact that we can train models to identify complex patterns in data and teach a computer to make decisions that can mimic human behavior is fascinating to me!


From everyone at Five9, we wish our interns the best of luck as some continue their academic studies and others continue their journey at Five9. The best is yet to come!