My past four months as an FDE intern at Charta have been a blend of learning quickly and building meaningfully. After observing the massive AI boom unfolding over the last few years, I saw that the intersection of AI and healthcare was still a largely underexplored space with much room to improve people’s daily lives. That’s what initially drew me to Charta.
What made my internship especially unique was that I wasn’t just buried in code: I was balancing deeply technical projects with client-facing work. On one hand, I was developing EMR integration workflows, scaling a note ingestion process from 720 to 4,000 notes a day. On the other, I was delivering demos to clients and hearing firsthand from the people using our tools. Being forward-deployed meant building trust through real conversations rather than just a support button, which I’ve found to be crucial in the world of healthcare.
The people were undoubtedly what made this experience so memorable. Even as Charta literally doubled in size during my internship, the tight-knit energy of a fully in-person team never wavered. I’m especially grateful to my mentor Qingyuan and my mentor-in-spirit Alex for their guidance; there was always abundant mentorship despite how early-stage the company was.
This internship pushed me toward the kind of engineer I want to be: one who stays as connected to the people I'm building for as I am to the systems I'm designing. I walk away now with a much clearer sense of the kind of work I want to do and a lot of gratitude for everyone who made this such a memorable experience.
Vibhor Guatam studies computer science and cognitive science at the University of Waterloo.