Andrea Chakma, a third-year mechatronics engineering student shares a little bit about her experience at the Royal Bank of Canada and TJX Canada.
Andrea spent her first work term at TJX Canada as a business analyst in their IT finance team. After that, she spent three terms at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in various roles such as Technical Systems Analyst, Cloud Security Developer and Data Engineer.
During her first term at RBC, Andrea says, “they paired me up with a senior developer in another team and she was phenomenal. I still have conversations with her today and she was an amazing role model who genuinely understood where I was coming from when I expressed my worries about doing well in a technical role. I wasn’t really sure where I was going career wise and how I wanted to grow but she really guided me through that.”
That mentor had introduced her to a manager, and they wanted Andrea to be a part of their team. Andrea took on this opportunity thinking it would be a great learning experience for her and didn’t know she was going to be lucky enough to secure a job during the pandemic! Since then, she has gone back to work at RBC again as a Data Engineer.
The importance of finding role models is incredibly important.
Andrea says her most rewarding thing about co-op has been, “the ability to have in person experience and industry experience. You take the different learnings you get in university and you get to apply them in a real-world situation which will actually help a company or help a person.”
Andrea Chakma and her fellow co-op students and coworkers during her work term at RBC.
What sort of technologies have you used in your work term that were new to you?
Some of the tools, frameworks and coding Languages Andrea learnt during her co-op terms includes C++, Python, C#, Java, HTML, XML, PowerShell, Git, AWS, Arduino, Jenkins, Confluence, Microsoft Office, Anaconda, Jupyter Notebook and Splunk.
What are some highlights of your co-op job?
I think the biggest highlight for me was during that my second co-op where they gave me 2 weeks to figure out this problem. There wasn't really any pressure that they put on me to get it done, but I felt a pressure on myself and then I was like OK, I want to go out of this co-op knowing that I really did this project super successfully.
Now that I've come back for like the third time at RBC, that tool is actually still in use by a lot of teams across RBC which is super super exciting because whenever I see it, I'm like oh yeah, I created that. I helped create that! I think that is my biggest achievement and something I’m most proud of.
