Jonathan Zhu

Reflecting on my time at RBC Amplify

· 6 min read

Through a series of miraculous strokes of luck, from being rejected to a consolation acceptance few weeks later, I ended up interning at RBC in the Amplify program this summer.

To start, I am incredibly grateful for what this summer has turned out to be. The work I did, the knowledge I learned, the mistakes I made, the people I met and the experiences I have encountered were so formative for me as not just an engineer but as a human being. In all honesty, RBC Amplify really is not your typical internship.

A Letter To Your Future Self

As part of Amplify, during the start of the summer, I wrote a letter to my future self.

To the dumbass writing this,

Stay stupid. I don’t mean this because you are not capable, not because you are inept at learning, not because you can’t grow but because you should take this opportunity to reset. Learn from everyone around you; your student peers, your mentors, the RBC Amplify program staff and the executives. Get rid of your preconceived notions of right and wrong and take everything in to the fullest. After all, your world view is the most important thing to your but it is valuable to be open-minded!

I want you to use this opportunity to learn with new people and develop more lateral skills like communication/soft skills. You will feel times of embarrassment, times of ridicule but these are parts of the fire that will forge you into a blade from metal! Embrace embarrassment, embrace ridicule, most of all embrace stupidity and work your hardest!

Spend time with your family though. Nothing is more important in this world than them.

Regardless of the outcome I want you to learn, develop and reflect that your time was not wasted and the experience was at least worth it. Regardless if you win or lose, or do anything great, still stay stupid and continue to learn!

Now that my term is over and the the summer is coming to an end, I think it is only natural to reflect upon this letter I wrote myself. While the instructions might have told us to set out specific goals we wanted to see being achieved, like “Did u make it to the finals at AmpExpo?1” or “Did you make lifelong connections?”, I wrote my letter really broadly surrounding the theme of remaining open-minded and risk-taking. Like the process of molting for a hermit crab, I wanted to take this opportunity to start from scratch; ditch the old shell of mine and find a new shell where I can grow “bigger” and even more capable.

From a technical perspective, I think there have been many achievements throughout the summer. Working on building an application for automating financial forecasting and enabling non-experts to utilize machine learning without the necessary training has been an incredibly fun and rewarding challenge to tackle. Through long hours on the problem, collaborating with my peers/mentors, and of course can’t forget my trusty Github Copilot, I learned so much about applying LLMs to real-world tasks, making system design decisions considering tradeoffs between development velocity and future scalability, as well as machine learning as a whole. However, I definitely wouldn’t say that I achieved my goals of remaining open-minded and risk-taking in the technical sense. Looking back, there were definitely times where I rushed through design decisions and could have talked to mentors more. Likewise, I think there were definitely opportunities to leverage more innovative decisions, whether it be from frontier research for orchestrating multi-agent systems or more closely examining tradeoffs in technologies. That being said coming out of the program with a patent-pending solution is definitely also a once in a lifetime experience for me and I would definitely say that my time was “not wasted and the experience was at least worth it.”

I have probably interacted with more people this summer than I have throughout the entirety of my university experience, whether it be students within the Amplify program or the full timers that I coffee-chatted or met during networking sessions. Even though it may seem simple, things like coffee chatting and networking were just not things the me a year ago would do. Through the Amplify program, I had such an incredible environment to learn how to talk and communicate better. There are so many examples of people who excel at communicating their ideas, from student peers and team leads to upper management that just being able to see them talked helped exemplify a goal I can work towards.

(And once again, for the 20th year in a row, I probably failed my goal of spending enough time with my family.)

What made my summer truly special

However, more than just the technical accomplishments and the soft skills that were gained, all friendships and connections I made throughout Amplify is what truly made it special. I am so grateful to meet so many incredible people that I probably would have never crossed paths with before. This summer has undoubtedly been the best 4 months I have spent in recent history and I owe that to all the people that I have met, talked to and learned from.

There are so many people I could write about that it couldn’t possibly fit in one reasonably sized list.

If you are on this list and reading right now, thank you! Likewise, if you are not on this list and I have talked to you this summer, just know that my summer would’ve been very different without you in it!

Another Letter To My Future Self

While I probably won’t write myself a letter as formal as the one I wrote this summer, I do think I should start setting more concrete goals for myself to reflect upon. So maybe this can be a traditional I take up every year from now on!

To myself from the future, how did I do this time?

Some goals of mine to work on and reflect upon in the summer of 2027:

  1. AmpExpo is the culminating pitch competition and final showcase of the RBC Amplify Program. ↩︎

#Internship