CodePath EES2024 SALESFORCE - Salesforce Overview & CodePath Intern Alumni Panel

Hey everyone, how are you liking day two of EES so far? Give me a heart or a thumbs up. Awesome.

It’s been great. Welcome to the breakout session, Success at Salesforce, hosted by the Salesforce team. I’ll be introducing our speaker shortly, but first wanted to share a few reminders.

Please utilize the chat to have conversations and share your thoughts during the session. Please keep messages relevant to the topic of the session and note that the presenters and speakers can see the chat. Our team will be monitoring the chat and questions may be answered live during the session.

Following the session, we ask that you complete the brief feedback survey. Your feedback is super important to us. With the reminders out of the way, I’d like to introduce our speaker today who will be presenting on having success at Salesforce.

And the first speaker is Hello. Thank you so much for the introduction, Josie. I appreciate it.

Hello everyone. So great to see everyone here. I think we’re going to have a slide come up.

Jose, do you know if it’s if everyone can see the slide? Oh, here we go. Here we go.

All right. Hello everyone. Please go ahead and check in.

So, scan the QR code, break out your cell phones, and make sure to get your information in for a chance to win Salesforce swag. We love our swag here at Salesforce. Hi everyone.

I see the chat blowing up. Oh, it’s so great to be here. So, we’re going to leave it on this slide for about 60 seconds.

So, you can dig out your phones, make sure that you’re scanning the QR code, get your information submitted in there. Definitely do not want to miss out on the Salesforce swag. I hope everybody’s having a great day.

Hopefully you’ve had some really informational sessions so far. We hope to add to that and tell you a little bit more about Salesforce and then we have a panel presentation. Will be super informative.

Make sure to get the questions in the Q&A tab for the panel and we’ll we’ll jump into the Q&A after we have a couple prepared questions to ask them. Hi guys. Hi.

Probably going to be about 30 more seconds. Want to make sure that you’re getting out your cell phone, scanning the QR code, submitting your information, tell us that you’re here and give us a chance to or give you a chance to win some Salesforce swag. Hi, howdy.

Yes, I’m in Texas. I’m I’m outside of Austin, so that’s very appropriate. All right, everyone.

If you’ve had a chance to scan the QR code, you’ve got like five seconds left to get your information in. We are giving out some Salesforce swag, so make sure that you are submitting that. Hi everyone.

So great to see everybody today. Oops. Sorry about that.

It’s my dog Stormy. I was hoping that didn’t happen. All right, Lindsay, are we ready to get started?

All right. So, hi everyone. My name is Stacy and I am a future force recruiter here at Salesforce.

I’m so excited to speak with you today and tell you a bit more about who we are and what we do. But before we jump in, we want to say thank you for spending time with us. We recognize you have a busy school schedule.

So, it means a lot to us that you choose to spend this time learning about Salesforce. Okay. So, I’m sure you have questions running through your heads right now.

And over the course of this presentation, I’m going to try my very best to answer those questions. My ultimate goal here is to introduce you to Salesforce and share with you who we are as a company. Okay.

So, I have a question for you. Does anyone know what Salesforce does? So, why don’t you drop it in the chat or what CRM stands for?

Anybody know what CRM stands for? All right, we can go to the next slide, Lindsay. I am seeing a lot of right answers in here.

You’re correct. So, Salesforce is the world’s number one AI customer relationship management platform or as we call it a CRM. At Salesforce, our vision has always been to help connect our customers with their customers in a whole new way.

This vision has guided every single action we’ve taken over the past 25 years. So, you might be wondering, but what does a CRM do? Well, whether it’s a Samsung, a Pixel, or an iPhone, most of us have one of these.

And what does your smartphone help you to do? It helps you to make your personal life easier, putting a whole lot of power in the palm of your hands. Really, it’s your own personal productivity tool.

They simply connect the dots for you in your personal life and make things easier to get done. Salesforce is just like an iPhone. It’s a platform that allows us to deliver great apps to our customer.

And we deliver those apps via our customer 360, the world’s number one CRM. So this is the customer 360. It’s what makes us the world’s number one AI CRM and helps companies build stronger customer relationships, drive faster time to value, and innovate with every technology wave.

We help them do this through our robust product portfolio covering sales, service, marketing, commerce, and so much more. Customer 360 is our customer’s single source of truth. And at the core of our platform is data cloud, our trusted AI platform.

All right. So, how did we arrive at current Salesforce? Well, it’s a long story.

Over the last 25 years, we have guided our customers through a major technology shifts through through multiple major technology shifts and we’ve been innovating for nearly a decade to bring AI to the enterprise. We started by going from cloud to social and then 10 years ago when we launched our first AI product Einstein, it helped us to do more with predictive applications. So that innovation and all of those insights that helped create a future built on the Salesforce platform.

So all of this innovation was a result of us riding the waves of the present AI revolution that has led us to data cloud and agent force. Now, because we’re in an AI revolution and we are committed to helping our customers navigate each wave of AI, the first wave was predictive AI and we responded with Salesforce Einstein. During the second wave, generative AI changed everything.

It’s this wave that made AI the technology of our lifetime and pushed the advancements forward at a pace that we have never seen before. Now, we’re at a new inflection point, the third wave of AI, which is agents. This is a moment when AI won’t just work for us, but right beside us like an extension of our team.

No matter where our customers are in their AI journey, we’re helping them meet each new wave. So, like I said, this is the AI agents era. So, let’s look at how we’re helping our customers.

Say hello to Agent Force, the solution to help humans with agents drive customer success together. Agent Force helps our customers build powerful autonomous agents for the front office for sales, service, marketing, commerce. Agent Force represents a quantum leap for our AI technology and a huge upgrade to co-pilots.

Agents are autonomous and don’t require conversational prompts to take action. They can anticipate, plan, and reason with minimal help. They can automate entire workflows or processes, make decisions, adapt to new information, all without human intervention.

But Agent Force ensures a seamless handoff between AI agents and human employees, facilitating collaboration across every line of business. And it’s these seamless transitions of data that have been such a challenge for our customers. That’s because many of our customers are navigating islands of siloed data.

So their data is scattered everywhere. Mainframes, apps on the internet and in all kinds of formats. In fact, 72% of company applications are disconnected.

In that trap data is trapped value. So, in comes data cloud. With data cloud, we’re helping every company unify their data and metadata.

Data cloud is our hypers scale data engine built right into Salesforce. So whether it’s Snowflake or Google or Amazon or data bricks, you know, all distributed data, you can then use that unified data to drive action across your customer 360. All that siloed data is connected, bringing unified workflows across every application, native AI with Einstein built in with predictive generative capabilities and most importantly power agents integrated with data cloud while being low to no code.

That is a big selling point for our customers. We’ve seen incredible success with customers like FedEx who has been able to deliver high volumes of international shipping with data cloud. So like it did with FedEx, data cloud is a gamecher for our customers.

So let’s talk a little bit about a little more about them meaning our customers. So you might be surprised how many unknown interactions you have with Salesforce in your daily life. So it begins in the morning when you have some Kellogg cereal.

Frosted Flakes is is my favorite. You you pour that while tuning into your favorite Spotify playlist. And both are powered by Salesforce.

The Kelloggs boxes you see on store shelves. They were no accident. Our commerce AI gives stores specific insights and stores ideal assortment to help maximize shelf revenue.

And then that Yeti water bottle you take on your run or you bring to class, the entire order management process from invoice to shipping notifications is powered on our commerce services and Tableau platforms. Pretty cool, huh? All right.

So, we are the world’s number one AI CRM. We are the C company, but most importantly, we are a people company. So, at Salesforce, our core values guide everything we do.

They are trust. So, trust is our number one value. It means that we act with transparency and lead with our ethics.

Customer success. We aren’t successful unless our customers are successful. Innovation.

We want our products to be the most relevant, easy to use, integrated, scalable, and global products out there. Delivering fast time to value for our customers. Equality.

We are committed to creating a more equal world and believe we are more powerful working together. And last, but certainly not least, is sustainability. Everything rests on a stable climate.

So, we’re helping every organization achieve net zero carbon emissions and lead by example as a net zero company. So, today, trust and innovation are critical parts of what we’re doing with Generative AI. All right, let’s take a look at how our values have led us since our earliest days.

So, I’m just going to hit some of the the data points on this slide. But at Salesforce, we truly believe that business is the greatest platform for change. Almost 25 years ago, we adopted our 111 model for philanthropy.

We pledged 1% of our equity, 1% of our time, 1% of our products to given to giving back. We’ve given $728 million in grants to local nonprofits. Our employees have done over $9 million of volunteer work.

And we have 59,000 nonprofits and educational organizations running on Salesforce. So that’s pretty amazing. Now inside Salesforce, we have equality groups.

Our equality groups are employee-led organizations that build community, educate allies, and drive equality. We currently have 13 equality groups representing the broad diversity of our employees. Everyone, including allies, are welcomed and encouraged to join any equality groups at Salesforce.

So, a quick fun fact, about half of our employees are members of an equality group. All right, now let’s talk about our tech launchpad program in partnership with CodePath. Let’s meet David.

So in 2022, maybe some of you know David, but in 2022 as a sophomore, David discovered CodePath when he was searching for internships. He saw that they had a couple of opportunities and he was particularly interested in the future force tech launchpad program. He applied right away and also enrolled in the CodePath intro to mobile dev class at FIU Florida International University.

In 2023, he returned to Salesforce for a traditional 12week internship. He was on the account engagement API team working on an internal demo or distribution tool. That’s a mouthful right there.

In 2024, he returned to Salesforce to begin his corporate career as an AMTS. Currently, he’s working on a WhatsApp integration for campaigns that will allow marketers to send automated WhatsApp messages. And here’s a little bit more about our tech launchpad program.

It is a 10-week paid work and learning free internship program. It’s an introduction to full stack web development. You are assigned a mentor.

So, there’s one-on-one weekly mentorship with a manager. There’s four projects for your portfolio, including your capstone project. Couple logistical details.

You must be over 18. You must be a rising junior. You must be in a computer science or computer engineering degree program and have completed a CS1 type of class like intro to programming.

And those who identify as black, Hispanic, Native American, students with disability, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. All right, we’re about to wrap up, but really quick, please add us on your favorite social media. I highly recommend LinkedIn to keep up to date on our events and our job postings.

Instagram is really fun, YouTube is really fun. But also you can learn more about us at salesforce.comfutureforce and you can check out our open roles there as well. Oh, just looking at the chat, you were part of the program.

That’s amazing. All right, well that’s it for me you guys. I had a blast coming in and chatting with you today.

But for now I am going to pass it over to my teammate Payton for our main event. Thank you, Stacy. Okay, just going to give it one second while we get the slides pulled up.

Easy. Real quick while we’re waiting, I can go ahead. Oh, here we go.

Okay. Just a reminder if you haven’t already to be sure to check in to our booth here so that we can stay in touch and also give you a chance to win some Salesforce swag. Next slide.

Maybe. Is it loading for everyone else too? Perfect.

But real quick, I can go ahead and give a little intro to our next session. We actually have a few of our Tech Launchpad alumni here to share a little bit more about their experience in the program and answer some of our questions. So once we have the slides pulled up and them added to the stage, we can jump in and thank you for sharing the link to the check-in.

Sorry, there were issues with the QR code. And then I see some questions coming in about the Tech Launchpad program. So real quick I can answer a couple of those.

So the program is offered to rising sophomores, so current freshmen. It’s a six-week pre-inter internship program, so that’s why it’s open to rising sophomores and not rising juniors. The program is led by CodePath.

So it’s entirely CodePathbased education. But you do get to participate in the sessions at our Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco. From there after the program, we do interviews for the ability to potentially convert into our internship program.

And our internship program is open to rising sophomores and rising juniors. Sorry, rising juniors and rising seniors. Okay.

And now we have our slide up with our panel presenters. So if we could get them added to the stage as well and they’re starting to come in. So just in order, I’m going to let them introduce themselves.

Aloy, do you want to go first? Yeah, I can give a quick introduction. Hey everybody.

So, my name is Aloy Oce. I was born in Witchah, Kansas, grew up in Houston, Texas. I attended Duke University for my undergrad, majoring in computer science and neuroscience.

I with CodePath I did the intermediate technical interview prep and also the FTL which we’ll talk more about today. In my kind of my progress through like my career started an FTL got a return offer returned to Salesforce as a software engineer intern after I got the full-time and now I am based in Atlanta Georgia working with the skewer runtime team as an associate member of technical staff. So, nice to meet everybody and hope to provide some information today.

Sweet. Thank you so much. Ava, do you want to go next?

Yes, I can go next. Hey everyone. My name is Eva Sandrich.

I’m recently I recently graduated from Florida International University with a computer science degree. I’m originally from Nicaragua. I moved here six years ago, around six years ago.

And my career journey has been quite an adventure. I’ve jumped from different careers. I started architecture and then I shifted to interior design before landing into computer science.

When I switched to computer science, it’s where I met people from CodePath and their programs and the FDL program. And now I’m here as a returning new hire software engineering AMTS at Salesforce. I recently got switched to a different team within the company.

I’m working in the agent force team which was what Stacy was presenting. And I hope to answer any questions you guys have. Awesome.

Thank you Monica. Hi everyone. My name is Monica Chilaw and I’m an AMTS software engineer at Salesforce.

I graduated from Juken University this May with a bachelor of science degree in computer science with a math minor and a bachelor of arts degree in cyber security. I am originally from Randa and I also moved here four years ago for school. And my journey with Salesforce began in 2022 through the future for tech launchpad program that was led by Codpath and I returned in 2023 as an intern working on the industry CLM team and then returned this year as a full-time employee working on the live sciences cloud and I’m currently based in Belleview, Washington in the Belleview, Washington office and I’m glad to be here today.

Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.

And last but not least, hello, my name is Yao and I was born and raised in New York. I attended St. John’s University also in New York. I’ve been a software engineer at Salesforce since February.

I started a bit earlier than our other panelists. But my journey was the same just as them. FTL and then SU internship with Heroku team API foundation and now I work on E3 mobile push team.

Excited to hear your interesting questions and answer and get insightful information. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Yeah, we can actually start with you for the first question since you so patiently waited to do your introduction. Our first question is what inspired you to apply to Tech Launchpad and what has your journey looked like so far? Okay, no problem.

So I had a non-traditional path where I was pursuing another profession which was pharmacy at first and I just took a leap into computer science and from there I was like what do I do? How do I get experience? And I countlessly kept looking looking for options on what can I do.

Luckily I found FTL and that was the perfect opportunity for me to get my foot in the door and get exposure and kind of understand what this realm of software engineering and tech tech the technology world is. So my journey was future tech future force tech launchpad then we moved on to a sweet internship and then now I’m a full-time engineer and yeah that’s pretty much my journey and my inspiration was just curiosity. Awesome.

Thank you so much. Aloy do you want to answer this one also? Yeah.

My journey is actually very similar to Yao’s. I came into college premed. So, I thought I wanted to be a doctor.

And I realized that, med school is not really cut out for me. So, I switched to computer science my sophomore fall. And kind of just getting into the tech field.

I didn’t really know how to like break into like a software engineer internship or anything like that. So it was actually getting really late into the year. I think around like March, April time when I saw the application for this future force tech launchpad program.

So I was just like why not why not apply? You never know what could happen. And I was lucky enough to get accepted.

So through that program I kind of like was able to gain confidence. There was a lot of imposter syndrome and that came up a lot in my internship and even in u my full-time role. But this program kind of gave me the confidence to know how to like navigate the I guess like corporate life and just kind of how to like instill that confidence in me to just go out and do my best, ask questions and and yeah.

So like same pipeline as Yao FTL intern to full software engineer intern to now full-time. Sweet. Thank you both so much.

Our next question is how has CodePath supported you in preparing for the real world? Monica, would you like to jump in here? Sure.

Thank you. That’s an a very good question. So during the FTL program, Codpat not only support provided me with like immense technical knowledge relevant to my career as a software engineer, but it also taught me the essential skills to help me grow in my career.

For instance during the program working with my colleagues to debug a code or find a solution to an issue was highly encouraged by the instructors. This instilled in me a sense of teamwork which is crucial for my career. And additionally the court path instructors were also very like supportive in sense that the I was always I always felt free to ask question no matter how dumb I thought they were and they would answer me without any criticism or judgment.

This is very important especially for a person who just like started my career because no matter how much technical skills I have there no matter how much like technical skills you have as a starting software engineer you will always have like new things to learn especially since it’s a new company and the new environment so it’s essential to ask questions and they really helped me in this way in that I was free to be myself and to like learn so yeah that’s how they really helped me to like adjust to the new world and the as a new software engineer. Thank you. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Monica. Our next question is, can you discuss some of the most valuable skills or knowledge you’ve gained during your time spent with FTL and interning at Salesforce and how you think that these will benefit you in your career? Eva, do you want to answer this one?

Yes, sure. For me was getting hands-on experience on like real world codebase and getting everything done from scratch like creating your API using databases connecting everything the back end and front end and getting to know the ins and outs of this helped me improve my technical skills. Also having a mentor a professional mentor and professional manager aside from Salesforce helped me like improve and get to know a lot of questions I had from the field.

And that helped me some somehow improve my soft skills. Yeah. Awesome.

And then next question. What did your initial expectations of working at Salesforce or sorry, how did your initial expectations of working at Salesforce compare to your actual experience working here and what surprised you the most? Monica, would you like to jump in again?

Sure, I would love to. So actually my initial expectation of working at Salesforce was very different from what the actual experience is. I expected it to be like a strict work oriented environment where my only expectation will be productivity and delivering.

I was actually surprised to see that this is not the case because my managers and my team members are also interested in my well-being and helping me grow in my career. I’ve had numerous one-on-one meetings with my mentor where she only she not only like wanted to hear what I was working on, but also wanted to know how I was taking care of my mental health and living my life outside of work. So, that was a really shock to me because I thought I was going to be coding, coding, coding, but that’s not the case.

Everyone at Salesforce is interested in your growth and your well-being in general. So, I really love that. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Aloy, how has your initial expectations compared to your time working at Salesforce and what surprised you the most?

I will agree a lot with what Monica said. The fact that I kind of came into this internship not really knowing what to expect and how my team was so accepting really surprised me. I thought like also was going to be very strict you have to get this done like code code.

But my team was very welcoming. Like my manager, we talked a lot about recipes or different food spots I can go in San Francisco. My my mentor sent me a lot of like internship or intern events in the cities to to go check out.

He was like like work is important, but like you need to develop those relationships outside of work and even like with other employees just to be successful. And also the translation from FTL to a full-time intern. I think there was a lot of soft skills that I learned in the program that helped me out with like time management, networking, and all that stuff.

So, while coding wise didn’t really apply because I I went from full stack with JavaScript to like coding in Java for my, my internship, all those skills like like I say before like time management stuff was so helpful and it enabled me to be successful in my role and I will say imposter syndrome is real but Salesforce kind of trains their even like the Salesforce culture helps you get over that. So, I agree a lot with Onica said. Awesome.

Thank you both. We’ll do y’all. Would you like to take the next one?

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to other CodePath members who are considering Tech Launchpad or an internship at Salesforce? Of course. So I would say definitely take the chance.

You never know what opport what what opportunity could lead you and in my case and Monica lawyers and Eva’s case we all here as full-time employees as a as Salesforce so that was pretty you know a big step that we took that got us here and that could also be one of you guys too. So Salesforce is also one of the best companies to work for and I believe that it was on 4chan rated one of the 100 best companies to work for for like about 15 years in a row. So there’s something about Salesforce that you can’t really get at many other companies and I believe other people can agree with that.

And also the culture at Salesforce, everybody’s always willing to help out. Everybody’s like generally rooting for you. There’s also people like that’s interested in your self-development that’s in the tech world and also personal world.

So Salesforce like offers so much that on the surface level you might not see but when you go a little bit deeper you see wow this is a great company. Yeah absolutely. Ava do you have anything to add?

Yes. So I’m going to sound a bit cheesy here, but I’m just going to say it. Believe in yourself.

Believe in your skills. Apply right away. Don’t doubt a minute about your skills.

And this is the purpose of this program FDL. It’s a pre-interrenship. It prepares you for a real internship.

Like you get to do a lot of things you might not be aware when doing a personal project. So you’re getting prepared for an internship for the next step. So I’d say just go ahead as Jos said and give it a try.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you Ava. And I’m going to go ahead and ask you the next one too.

How have mentorship and networking opportunities at Salesforce helped you grow professionally? Yes. So I’m going to go first with the networking question.

So Salesforce and CodePath they both provide like a lot of bunch of events you can take advant advantage for on and for example this event you can take advantage on it and start growing your network and Salesforce has a lot of events and interns events that you can get to know people and professionals on the field and that’s really important for mentorship ship. That’s for me I have an specific mentorship experience I had with with one of my mentors last year. So when you you’re working with GitHub and a huge code base you’re prone to make mistakes, right?

So I had one with rebasing you think you know like the basics of basics of GitHub like pulling pushing fetching and pushing and creating a new PR right but sometimes you can get like a thousand or more 10,000 sub commits and like 50 files changed and you’re like at the edge of a heart attack and you don’t want to ask questions. Because you feel like you’re going to be judged. But for me I had the I was luckily enough to have a good mentor and that happened to me not once but two times and the second time I was like afraid to ask again to help me out to ask my mentor to help me out with that issue.

But what I’m trying to say here is don’t be afraid to ask question or ask the question again if you don’t get it if you didn’t get it the first time. Like they’re there for to help you. Like they’re not going to judge you.

They know you’re new to all of that and it’s going to be helpful for your professional growth in this field. Yeah, absolutely. That is such great advice.

Monica, I would love to hear from you. Do you have any specific experiences where a mentor or a Salesforce colleague maybe like made a difference for you during your time as a scholar or an intern? Yeah, sure.

My experience is pretty much similar to Evas and me upon joining Salesforce I was also assigned a mentor and they are most often called on boarding buddies or friends and I also had the same issue where when I started I thought I would have it all together because you know I have all these JavaScript knowledge and everything but when I started working we were working on a platform that was new to me it’s called core and I think it’s specific to Salesforce. And it’s very prone to like errors and I didn’t know what to do until my mentor reached out and was like if you you need any help if you have any questions you feel free to ask me and in the initial stages I was like kind of scared to ask but as I got to to know her more and more she was I was really open to her and she shared she shared a lot of the experience she says she had while she was also on boarding because the mentors some of them are not like don’t have a lot of work of experience so I was glad to I have one that had also recently joined and the things I was facing she’s also she was also faced them and she would tell me the challenges she faced and how to she solved them and it it like had a great impact on my growth because I understood that I’m not the only one facing these things and I was I was like more eager to innovatively find solution to these challenges as opposed to like feeling overwhelmed and being stressed about these challenges. So yeah, it was really good having a mentor from the start.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say mentorship is something that we really prioritize here at Salesforce, both for new hires and interns, but throughout your career here as well. Our next our last couple of questions are just going to have a little bit more to do with inclusion in the company and you know the impact that Salesforce has had on you guys.

So we’ll go to y’all. I would love to hear what has been your experience with Salesforce’s diversity and inclusion efforts and how do you think we’re doing in promoting an inclusive workplace. Okay.

So Salesforce does an amazing job at diversity inclusion. So FTL was were my starting part with Salesforce and with FTL you noticed that it was a group of people that was in underrepresented in tech and from there you saw different people Hispanics African-Americans but once you stepped out that FTL room you saw that the company like reflected that same aspect where everybody is is somebody different and you could find somebody else that relates to you. So that was a very comforting thing that I noticed while in Salesforce.

Also another thing is that diversity wasn’t only just in our cohort as I mentioned it extended to the sweet interns and then the full-time employees. So it was very comforting just to realize that and also the company as basy mentioned early on we have a bunch of equality proofs. So you’ll find something that suits you and it’s it could be another family in a sense and also Salesforce also does a thing where we have we celebrate certain things such as recently it was Hispanic Heritage Month and we had theme snacks in the office like so that was pretty cool.

So Salesforce does a great job. I think any of us can attest to that. Oh, you’re muted, Payton.

Thank you. Yeah, I love what you said, y’all, about, you know, not only encouraging it, but really celebrating everyone’s unique differences and unique backgrounds here at Salesforce. Aloy, we’ll go to you for the last question.

It’s kind of two-part, but how has Salesforce supported you throughout your journey? And are there any specific communities or initiatives within the company that have had an impact on you? Yeah.

I can touch on that a bit. So, I think Salesforce did an amazing job, especially with our cohort. To kind of make us feel included.

Something that I actually really appreciate that Salesforce did was during our FTL internship, they still like included us in all the regular intern events. So, I think for me the fact that I got to go and actually meet our interns, like I kind of felt more like an intern myself. Because coming in I was like I’m not really an intern.

I’m more like a scholar quote unquote. But they did a really good job making us feel included. Even giving us a community of like a mentor who actually worked at a company to like be that buddy that we can ask questions to.

I think they did a really good job at from day one making us feel included. And kind of extending it to now like full-time. Kind of like what Yao said, there’s a lot of equality groups that throw events.

So I was also in the Atlanta office and they did the Hispanic Heritage Month celebration on the Ohana floor and it was really cool to see like different dancers, different events. So I think those are good opportunities to like kind of build community. Kind of take everyone away from the work and like kind of like bring that social aspect to it.

And I really do appreciate how Salesforce puts together these events to get everyone together. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you panelists for answering all of my questions.

I’m looking through the chat now and I’m going to ask you guys some of the questions from our attendees. So, one of them is, what kind of projects do software engineering interns typically work on at Salesforce? Does anyone want to take this one?

Talk a little bit about their intern projects. Oh, I can talk a little bit about mine. So I’m a part of the schema runtime team.

And to talk a little bit about what they do, they handle current operations at runtime. So, if I was to give an example, I would say like think of like data as like books in the library and think of our team as the special librarian who pretty much handles all of that those books quote unquote while the library is open. So, we pretty much handle all the data while all of our products are up and running on the sites.

So, we don’t have to shut everything down just to fix it. So, my intern project was to create I have my own individual project, so I created something from start to finish. So my project was to create a a formula engine transformer device which takes all of the old test test cases and took that framework and converted it in XML to a new test case framework so they can apply more to Salesforce’s changes because right now they’re doing a lot of changes in our frameworks.

We’re going from something called UD to UMD. So my intern project pretty much facilit facilitated that. Sweet.

Thank you. Anyone else want to talk about their teams a little bit? Yeah, sure.

I can do that. So to add on what Aloy said so for the FTL experience we had to the for the first five weeks we were learning like tech stack and then for the last five weeks we were put in like individual project we are putting like in projects of like three or five people and then we came up with a project of our own and then we start we did it from a start to finish both back end and front end but then for the actual intern like in 2023 I worked on the industry CLM team and what they do so what they do is that they work on contracts between Salesforce and their employ and their partners. So they they work on making like drafting contracts for Salesforce and their customers.

So my project was was to so like the the Salesforce has its own AI feature called Einstein GPT. So the the Salesforce contracts team was looking to to embed that AI into the contract. So like just like you you asked tragic to like write something for you.

So Einstein GPT was also supposed to help the contracts team to like draft contracts. So that’s what I worked on. I embedded Einstein GPT into the Salesforce contracts team.

Yeah. Thank you. Awesome.

Well, thank you guys for sharing a little bit more about what your summers looked like here at Salesforce. I see a lot of questions kind of related to recruiting timeline, what opportunities look like this fall. So, just to give a quick overview on that, our recruiting timeline kind of varies across our different roles.

So, our software engineering internship, for example, the role is posted right now and we are actively recruiting for that position. For our software engineering internship, we do a skills match process. So once you submit your application, we have several different teams as you heard from our panelists here explain that, you know, a lot of our projects and teams are varied and looking for different candidates to join.

So we do a skills match with all of our different hiring teams. From there, if we do identify you as a skills match, we will send a hacker incessment. Depending on your outcome of your assessment.

From there, we do team matching and begin the interview process with your specific hiring team. That process can take some time. So, I do see a lot of questions about submitted applications.

Also, we just ask to please be patient. We, like I said, do skills matching, you know, throughout the fall. So, we do spend a lot of time just making sure that we’re reaching out to candidates that best fit our hiring team’s needs.

But doing that, the process can take some time. So, if you’ve submitted your application, then no further action needed on your end. Like I said, we’ll be reviewing them and sending those assessments to candidates that are a best fit.

Outside of software engineering, we do have a few other, you know, data science, CIO, PM roles, etc. anything that we have available under those umbrellas will all be posted to our future force careers site and a lot of them follow a pretty similar path. Some do have a phone screen instead of that initial coding assessment. But similar where we do, you know, matching your resume to our hiring team’s needs.

And if there is a fit, you’ll be reached out to directly. And again, all of those can be found on our careers site. For the tech Launchpad program, we do not have that role posted yet.

That will actually be posted via CodePath. So, you guys will be the first to know once that goes live. And from there, CodePath does a lot of the reviewing process for applicants for that role.

And then for those new grad AMTS roles, we don’t currently have any for 2025 at the moment. They’re all we do have a couple posted for immediate hire. So I would recommend keeping an eye out on those AMTS roles closer to whenever your graduation date is.

So if you’ve already graduated, definitely feel free to apply to our AMTS roles that we currently have posted. But if you’re approaching graduation in December or May, I just recommend waiting a little bit closer to time to apply for those. So hopefully that ironed out the recruiting timeline questions and I’m not.

And then I’d love to hear from our panelists. Just outside of kind of your technical skills, what do you feel like made you stand out throughout the recruiting process for either Tech Launchpad or for your internship experience? Ava, would you like to take that one?

Yes. So, for me, networking, like networking, it’s huge. Like if you can meet people from inside CodePath or salesforce like I know referrals work work and also if we’re talking about the FDL program so you so they give you like guidelines for the to apply you got to go beyond and ahead like you gota make the coding challenge better than they they are expend expecting you to do.

And that for me, made the my application stand out. And again, networking, like networking is huge. Yeah, absolutely.

Does anyone else want to share any skills or specific traits they saw across the cohort that you think helped you stand out in the interview process, either yourself or even your teammates? Sure. I can add a little on what Eva said.

So, apart from actually going, beyond like get into the FTL program. So, when I was in the FTL program, having regular one-on- ones with my manager at the time was really helpful because I would get feedback feedback from her about what I was doing right, what I was doing wrong, how I can make my experience better. So, just having to communicate my needs and understanding what she expects of me was really helpful in the whole experience and it helped me to get an offer as an actual intern.

So, yeah, definitely connect with your manager. Yeah, absolutely. It’s all about connecting and networking for sure.

And then we’ll close it out with kind of a fun one. Y’all, we can start with you. I would love to just hear your favorite part about working at Salesforce.

Okay. My favorite part has to be the snacks. Going into the office, first thing I do is grab a bowl, grab some Cinnamon Toast Crunch, grab some oat milk, and then, you know, eat the the cereal for a good part, and then I return back to the kitchen for some more snacks.

And it’s the great part of it, you know, it’s free. Yeah, we’re very health consscious here at Salesforce. Who wants to go next?

Favorite part. I think my favorite part was the merch. I literally had to buy like a whole new I had to buy another carry on just to to take so forth March after the internship.

So, I really loved all the free stuff I was getting and the gummy bears too. I love them. Yep.

Absolutely. Ava Loy, either of you. I’d say, so I did my internship in San Francisco, so I really like the the Ohana floor and the free coffee from professional baristas.

I wasn’t like a coffee lover, but after that, like I drink coffee every day. Yep, for sure. The Ohana floors are the best.

Okay, last but not least, I would say, the events. I know sometimes in SF since there’s a lot of people, they don’t do as many events, but in the Atlanta office, we’ve had like at least three or four like different food events. One’s like with tacos, one was like Bombi.

There’s like there’s a watch party for Dream Force. So, stuff like that is really cool. Also, the game rooms.

I used to love playing foosball in high school. So we always got really competitive. So, it’s always fun to, you know, get some friends, play some foosball, ping pong, or probably hop on a Gamecube in one of the offices.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can close this out and share my favorite part, too, but I would actually say that my favorite part are events just like this. I love getting to connect with students and connect with our future force alum, our panelists, our interns.

Just all of our university team is the best. And it’s so much fun getting to, you know, answer questions like this and do our best to help you start your career journeys in the best way possible. So, one last big thank you to all of our panelists, our presenter Stacy earlier, and then just one last thank you to you guys for joining us in the session and all of your super insightful comments and questions.

We really appreciated you taking the time. And last thing is last time I’ll say it, but please remember to use the check-in code to let us know that you stopped by our booth. Well, we have reached the end of our session.

And we’d like to thank the Salesforce team for all of their information. It was really engaging. It was so much fun to learn from all of the CodePath alumni and to hear all about Salesforce and of course their chocolatecovered pretzels.

Remember, please drop by the Salesforce booth to chat with them and to get their QR code again and show them that you’re interested. We encourage you to do that during networking time. And to close us out, we’ll now go to a brief video from our host, Bobby V.

Next up, we have network breaks. And remember, here’s a nuggets. Your network is your net worth.

So hopefully you hear that, Jim. But here’s some information I want you all to remember. You can access the network lounge or visit the company’s booths during this break.

This is a great time to connect with companies and each other. So, we encourage you to go visit the spaces and build connections.