For the past three years, I’ve been a contributor at Mozilla, working on everything from documentation, to quality assurance (QA), to development, on projects like Mozillians and Firefox OS (now Connected Devices). I didn’t start out with the goal of being an intern. In fact, when I started I had no intentions other than wanting to do something cool for the web.

I started working with my mentor, Matt Brandt, on some cool projects with the Web QA team. He showed me what it was like to be a part of an organization as special as Mozilla, and how vital contributors were to the mission. I soon found my own contributor to mentor, and was able to put myself in Matt’s shoes and see the difference I could make as a mentor. The sense of community at Mozilla is overwhelming, and you can truly feel the value they place on involvement.

At Mozilla, they like to use the word contributor, than volunteer. They want to make people feel as if they’re contributing to something larger than themselves, not just giving away free labor to a software corporation, and as a long-time contributor, I feel like I’ve made a difference, and apparently, they did too. I was invited to attend the first All-Hands Work Week in Portland — a week-long work week to bring all teams and employees at Mozilla together, with a few core contributors. I was honored to be selected as one of these core contributors to attend the next two in Whistler, British Columbia, and Orlando, Florida. And now, as an intern, I’ll be flying to London for this summer’s all-hands.

Throughout all of my blog posts, I’ve probably made it very clear, but I’ll say it again — Never once in a million years would I have imagined myself being able to be a part of something that values their contributors, enough to bring them along and pay for them to come to a conference. Mozilla is truly a special organization, and that’s why I feel so honored to be further integrated into the mission and the organization as an intern.

This summer, I’ll have one free day of summer after my high school graduation before I depart on a plane to Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley where companies from Apple to Google to Mozilla call home.

I will be working as part of the Cloud Services Engineering and Operations Team as a Quality and Automation Intern, working on ensuring Firefox’s Addons continue to be the best marketplace compared to other browsers.

Though he’ll probably say something like “You did this yourself,” I want to give a huge shoutout to Matt Brandt, my mentor for the past two years, for guiding me along the way and teaching me everything he knows. I wouldn’t have made it this far without him.

Also, Dave Hunt, my mentor last summer and official mentor for this summer for helping expand my skill set and teaching me I can do more than I think I can.

Lastly, the Mozwebqa Team, Rebecca Billings, Krupa Raj, Bob Silverberg, Matt Brandt, Dave Hunt, and Stephen Donner for putting up with my questions and always being there.

Along the way, I’ll write more technical posts about what I’m working on, new tools I’m working with, and my experience here.

For the fun stuff, follow me on Instagram, and Twitter, for some (hopefully) beautiful pictures of California and intern activities :)