Summer Internship Spotlight: Chaitanya Rajkumar (MBA’23): Amazon

Each year, Georgetown McDonough students spend their summers in Washington, D.C., across the nation, and around the world working in corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations. Meet a few of our graduate and undergraduate students in our 2022 Summer Internship Spotlight series.

Tell us about your summer internship.

This summer, I interned as a product manager – technical at Amazon in the company’s Operations Technology organization based out of Austin, Texas. My summer project included two tasks – one was to evaluate the latest wearable barcode scanners available in the market, and talking to vendors about onboarding them in order to improve the experience of warehouse associates. The other task was to envision a future state in which warehouses are completely automated, by eliminating human-dependent barcode scanning. This involved coming up with a recommendation about the emerging technologies that could be adopted and how that might be integrated with the existing ecosystem.

How did your internship relate to your professional or personal interests? 

Coming into the MBA program, my goal was to work in a product management role in big tech, so the internship was exactly what I was looking for. Given my passion for understanding how technology is used to drive business goals, I’m glad I had the opportunity to work on something similar and apply the lessons I had learned during the first year of school.

How did you find the internship?

I applied after attending the company presentation.

What’s the most interesting or impactful thing you worked on during your internship?

The most interesting part of my internship was the space I worked in. As I dove deep to understand the nuances of machine learning and its use cases in warehouse operations, I had a glimpse of where the future was headed. Developing a vision for this based on my findings and recommending tactical steps to get there was a really challenging, yet enjoyable problem to tackle.

What did a typical day look like?

A typical day included meeting with external vendors and internal stakeholders to better understand products and the technology that enabled them. I’d then get to work on my deliverable, which was a six-page recommendation that had to include all of the necessary data and rationale supporting it. After completing a version of this, I’d have meetings with the internal product team and other SMEs to get feedback on my work. I also spent time reaching out to Hoyas in the company and set up chats with people who were working on products that fascinated me.

What advice do you have for other students? 

Leverage your position as an intern to network with as many people in the organization as possible. I find that most people are generous with their time and knowledge when they are talking to an intern. These conversations helped me gain clarity about what I wanted to do post-MBA, and more importantly, what I didn’t want to do.