Accomplishments and Challenges
During my time at TELUS, I have successfully created an application that helps our team track our sprint's velocity, which is now an essential part of our sprint planning. Besides the mentioned application, I have also been involved in multiple capital projects as a full-stack engineer.
However, those accomplishments did not come easily, there were a lot of challenges that I have to face during my co-op terms. Given that my team mostly engineered applications for the TELUS network, it means that all engineers involved must have good foundation knowledge of computer networking. And this really has created a problem for me as I have barely scraped the surface of computer networking through my courses at SFU. Luckily, TELUS has a great culture of investing in their employee growth, through the use of free courses offered by TELUS, I have been able to leverage those resources to make myself become a better engineer and help me become competent at my job.
Cultural and Environmental Observations
One thing that surprised me during my co-op at TELUS was that TELUS is not solely a telecommunication company, but it is actually a tech company, or at least it is transitioning to being a tech company. When I first joined the company, I could never imagine a telecommunications company that invested so much in technologies like AI and IoT. But that is exactly what TELUS is doing, they are always trying to innovate and redefine themselves as a company.
Social and Extracurricular Activities
What is amazing about TELUS is the social and extracurricular activities. At TELUS, you are encouraged to give back to the local community. Around the year, there are multiple volunteering opportunities for employees to sign up for. The cool thing about this is that it will be counted as work hours so you will not have to work extra hours to make up for the time that you do volunteering, it is a great opportunity to network with people from different teams and departments. It is also a good opportunity for you to stand up and move around instead of sitting in front of the computer screen like most normal working days.
Besides all the volunteering opportunities offered by TELUS, as a co-op, you will have access to a lot of TELUS's Graduate Technology Leadership Program (GTLP) events. At those events, you get a chance to hang out with other co-ops and people within their new grad program. This is an excellent opportunity for you to network and learn about different sectors within TELUS. Furthermore, these events are extremely helpful if you want to join their new grad program in the future as talking to the people in the new grad program does provide a lot of important information that will help you prepare for your application to join the GTLP program.
