Overview

During my internship at NVIDIA, I worked on the Product Security Team to develop a part of Morpheus, a cloud-native cybersecurity framework which uses machine learning to identify, capture, and take action on threats and anomalies that were previously impossible to identify including leaks of unencrypted sensitive data, phishing attacks, and malware. I specifically worked on the user-facing side of this by creating an internal-facing full-stack portal to allow NVIDIA engineers to analyze different security logs from sources like AWS, GCP, Kafka, etc.

Product Security is a fast-paced fast-growing team that is comprised of several different smaller teams. My team in specific, Software Security Operations, was responsible for creating and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that support all NVIDIA engineers. Although this was my first experience in security and that too in a company that prioritizes efficient innovation, I honestly felt like home.

Takeaways

Know your Priorities

Coming into NVIDIA I was really nervous about how to approach this internship. I knew that because I didn’t come from a traditional security background that I may have a bit of a learning curve trying to learn all of the acronyms, tools, and technologies. However, I quickly realized that I needed to frame my internship experience to leverage my strengths and more importantly, my goals in such a way that I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. By clarifying what my goals were for my internship, it allowed me to focus on the “now” as opposed to focusing on the “what if” or “what next.”

My main goal for my internship was to learn as much as I could and complete a project in a tech-stack that I knew nothing about. As a result, my main intern project was in full-stack ML, where I honestly knew nothing about all of the moving parts of what creates an effective security portal. However, I was determined to learn and with this mindset, I tackled the rest of my internship – “learn how to break things, but also learn how to fix them.” Because I went in with this mindset of learning, I honestly was able to enjoy my experience and make meaningful impact within my team. I strongly suggest to any intern to understand and reflect on what your goals are for your internship and then prioritize what steps you can take now to get there.

Learn to Listen and Ask Meaningful Questions

I thrive in social settings and as a result, ended up chatting with my coworkers quite frequently! Even if it was because I was debugging, wanted advice, or even wanted a small break, I’d always reach out to different people on our outside of my team. Talking to people is important to understand how diverse your team is and to build meaningful relationships. However, learning how to listen is arguably more important. I think I spent 30% of my chats talking and 70% listening to all of the insightful advice and life lessons that my coworkers had to share on a whim. I ended up learning some very deep things about myself, about what I wanted to get out of my career (very meta), and how to navigate different workplace scenarios. The conversations and relationships that I built were one of the most important takeaways and will cherish for a lifetime because I learned how to listen and ask questions

Speak Up, Speak Loud

One of my most impactful side projects during my internship was a product of asking a random question to the data team about their current workflow. I honestly was curious about their workflow and had an idea on how to potentially streamline it. At first, it was scary trying asking a question in front of engineers, managers, directors, and a VP! However, I learned to be confident in my abilities and use my voice. Although I was an intern, I progressively grew more confident in my voice and worked on several initiatives with my team integrating my ideas. Every person on a team has the ability to foster change, regardless of where on the “totem pole” they are at. By speaking up, and speaking with confidence, I was able to use my voice to create meaningful change within the organization just by taking the first step and asking the first question.