For more than two months, Runar Gudbjartsson had been working on the next version of PayPal’s mobile app. Now, in the cafeteria at the company’s headquarters, he’s showing off the fruits of his labor.
“The past few weeks have been agile because we’ve been throwing out a lot of new designs very quickly,” he said, surrounded by posters displaying his work and employees who have crowded the room in San Jose, California, during their lunch hour.
Listening to him talk, you might think Gudbjartsson is a senior designer, but he isn’t. He’s an intern. And he’s showing off the app as part of PayPal’s 2015 Intern Showcase.
There aren’t any sandwiches at the showcase, just people — lots of them. The room looks a bit like a science fair. Card tables line the walls, and behind each one stands an intern showing off a unique project using everything from PowerPoint presentations to computer screens filled with code. While each might look like an experiment of sorts, these experiments will helptransform how
PayPal operates both internally and externally — and they’ve all been made by a PayPal intern.
“I think ultimately for the internships at PayPal we try to accomplish two key things: we want to make sure that interns are able to have a very meaningful experience and also that PayPal gains something from having the interns on our campus working on real projects,” said Patrick Tse, PayPal’s Global Head of University Recruiting.
PayPal welcomed interns in North America, China, Singapore, India and Europe this year. They were at various skill, age and educational levels, and included graduate students, MBAs and Ph.D.s.
Interns Marisa Johnson, Dreema Patel and Runar Gudbjartsson dive into their PayPal projects during the Intern Showcase at PayPal’s headquarters on Tuesday, Aug. 4 Kristen Fortier/PayPal
For Gudbjartsson, a student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, one of the biggest wins of his time at PayPal was the chance to test his designs on real people.
“In school, the feedback I get is mostly based off myself or my friends,” he said. “Having someone actually interact with something you created, someone you don’t know or someone that is new to this design, is very different.”
That user testing helped him see things he hadn’t, and prompted changes in the app’s design. That app design he has been working on will likely be released to customers, complete with some of his additions, early next year.
At the table next to him, Marisa Johnson is showing off something completely different.
“I jumped in on a project where they’d done a lot of research around the underbanked, people who are not served by normal financial institutions,” she said. “They honed in on the problems and found people need help saving their money, they need help determining how much money they can spend in terms of budgeting.”
The solution? Johnson’s team created a number of ideas; one of them allows customers to pay a single bill each month through PayPal and then PayPal would handle paying each of the customer’s bills throughout the month. The idea is currently being tested and may potentially become a PayPal offering.
“My team is really small, it’s two people and me, and then we pull in folks from other teams to help out,” said the MBA student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “It’s been a really collegial environment, really collaborative. I’ve taken on a lot of responsibility.”
Gudbjartsson and Johnson are two examples of interns whose projects contribute to real production and releases, Tse said. In fact, interns and recent college graduate hires have represented more than 200 filed patents over the years, he added.
Throughout the program, interns are given the opportunity to not only work with a variety of PayPal employees but each other, too.
“We do a lot in the spirit of bringing all our interns together in both educational and social ways,” Tse said. That can mean everything from business dinners to go-karting adventures.
The goal is that interns are able to learn something and to expand their network with a new community of peers, all eager to help one another out. “The enthusiasm. It was pretty cool,” said Harshit Manocha, a grad student at San Jose State University who spent the summer working in the PayPal Command Center, which helps ensure that all of PayPal’s systems and servers are up and running.
It’s a thought echoed by other students, many who plan to pursue careers at PayPal after they graduate, in part because they enjoy the culture so much. “My manager is awesome. My team is awesome. It was awesome,” said Dreema Patel, a graduate student at San Jose State University who worked on designing a new activation experience for nonprofit merchants.
Many PayPal interns do land full-time jobs with the company once they graduate. Aravind Srivatsan is one of them: He interned with the Global Operations team in Chennai earlier this year and then joined the group as an employee where he is continuing to work on his internship project, a new customer dashboard for the front office team.
“I have always wondered how PayPal processes money everywhere around the world with ease,” he said. “It excites me now to be on board and understand what I have only wondered.”
About the writer: Emily Price is a freelance journalist who has covered consumer technology for over a decade. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Mashable and Popular Mechanics.