one week before hack the north, td bank reached out for an onsite interview. a phone call monday, confirmation thursday, interview 6pm saturday—right in the middle of the hackathon. i'd been applying since summer 2024 with nothing to show; this was my first real interview. it felt more like a conversation than an evaluation, and sunday afternoon they called with the offer. i blanked and said thanks.

the resume and the timing mattered—hack the north showed i was building. so did showing up: volunteer, hacker, mentor, judge, cross-enrolling at waterloo just to get to more hackathons. no prizes, but a lot of rejections and a lot of shipping. if you keep building and stay authentic, eventually the pieces fall into place. this is my first real internship, and that's the playbook that got me here.

first day was the intern event. met a bunch of cool people like victor, maurya, and luke, got set up with the laptop, badges, the whole spiel, and even a headshot. i work out of td terrace on the 14th floor, so the view was a nice bonus while everything got rolling.

the team was credit origination and funding, so the work lived right where customer intent becomes real money movement. a typical day was tracing flows, spotting where latency hides, and tightening handoffs so approvals feel instant without sacrificing risk controls.

the core of it: building systems for in-branch employees to process and fund customer applications for credit products like mortgages, credit cards, loans, and lines of credit.

team setup was a scrum master, a po, 3 devs, and 2 qe’s, so standups were tight and everything moved fast.

i spent a good chunk of time refactoring legacy code and cleaning up old flows so new changes didn’t feel brittle.