u/daniel_blatner

Thank you for the note! It's been an incredible experience, and the people here are absolutely the stand-out highlight.

These are really good notes, thanks for sharing them! Could you go into a little bit more detail on what you mean by considering how projects are structured? Are you specifically referring to MATLAB Projects? And I'm sorry for sending so many questions right back at you, but do you have any plugins that you yourself use in your workflows that you find particularly helpful?

 Hi! The first round is an online assessment and you're given a healthy amount of time for each question. I can't speak to what this year's may look like, but for me it was two questions.

For more details, take a look at this response I gave to a similar question.

Thanks for the question. I'll point you to this response I gave to a similar question. Depending on the role you're applying for the number of rounds can be different: https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/students/how-we-hire.html

Hi! Thanks for the question. I'll point you to this response I gave to a similar question. If you have any other questions that remain unanswered let me know!

Good question! It definitely ranges based on the person, but I personally have found agentic development to be a useful tool for many of the workflows I engage in. While it certainly hasn't replaced all of my actual coding work, it's shifted my responsibilities to be very focused on creating and communicating a very clear what, why, and how of the solutions I want. This means I spend a lot of time working with colleagues to get the architecture and general solution right before working closely with an agent to get it written (then back to myself and colleagues to review and validate).

I really enjoy the planning, diagramming, and architecting work I do, so working with an agent to implement my intent efficiently has been very empowering as a developer!

Have you been using AI/LLMs in your work with MATLAB at all?

While I can't discuss specifics re: compensation, you may be able to find info on job openings available on the MathWorks website. Benefits are plentiful, and you can take a look at this response I gave previously on office perks and benefits!

I love this question about EDG! It can definitely seem like a black-box so I'm happy to provide whatever insights I can.

I haven't yet started up my support rotations, but historically the project/support rotations are in chunks of two week-long blocks, with projects lasting variable amounts of time depending on the scale of the work (lots of projects last between 4-8 weeks). My most recent project fell under that 8 week category and included both development work and research/exploration. There are some potential shifts in how support is working in EDG so I don't want to get too detailed on support answers that may be out of date, especially as I haven't gotten ramped up on it myself yet :)

You have lots of say in the projects you do, with the ability to network throughout the company with managers and other MathWorkers in whatever field excites you! My first project has been with the MATLAB Editor team as the Markdown space caught my eye, and my next one will be working with the Econometrics Toolbox! You're given a lot of autonomy as an EDGer to explore what's exciting to you in the company, and really sink your claws into projects in those spaces. We even have a huge internal billboard with projects from all across the company available for EDGers to pick up!

If you have a project experience that you absolutely loved, even your first one, that can be very informative of where you're wanting to spend your time and where you may eventually want to transfer. The broader goal of EDG is to explore, but it's a great piece of data to have early on if you have a great experience! EDGers are often encouraged to identify "target areas" of where they want to land after EDG, and good experiences definitely help flesh that out and let you focus on ramping up on more complex projects in those spaces, while still developing your early career skills.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask more!

Great question! While there's a lot of things you could do to learn MATLAB for this class, I'd say the best thing to do (from my personal experience) is use our documentation liberally! We have a huge amount of high-quality documentation that you can either read online or directly from within the editor! Take a look at the doc command here: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/doc.html

If you want a very clean intro to MATLAB, the MATLAB Onramp is a great streamlined (and free!) introduction to core MATLAB concepts: https://matlabacademy.mathworks.com/details/matlab-onramp/gettingstarted

I like to get hands-on, so finding a project that may fit your chem-eng background to get an intro to actually applying MATLAB would be my go-to! Some quick googling found this that could be neat: https://serc.carleton.edu/teaching_computation/workshop_2019/activities/230829.html

You could also take a look at the official MATLAB Chemical Engineering page that has some really compelling industry examples and potential inspiration: https://www.mathworks.com/solutions/chemical-engineering.html

Don't forget to take it slow when possible and really try to understand the concepts. The docs are your friend!

Good luck!

Thank you for the questions and sorry for the delay in response! I'll do my best to respond as best as possible but as a CS/ interactive media background I'm not the most in-tune with the Controls side of things, though it's an interesting space!

1. There are definitely engineers of all domains here! EDG has a kind of "cohort" system of folks who all start together on the same day. I know a lot of cohorts that have a large diversity of engineering backgrounds, and while most of the people from my cohort were CS, we had a few ME and I think even a Chem Eng. RBE is definitely a more niche major but I'm sure we have some here!

Whether or not you work alongside them is definitely team-dependent. I've worked primarily on purely software so far, but I have friends in my cohort who have done embedded systems projects which definitely put you in contact with domain-specific folks. If there's a technical domain we touch with a product, it's almost certain that we'll have domain-specific expertise in that area from our engineers (at least from my experiences).

1. The process was great! One of my favorite interview processes. It started with an online assessment for technical skills, as well as a pre-recorded video interview. I definitely struggled with the video interview, but practice beforehand and don't get too thrown off by the fact that you're recording, think of it like you're just talking to a real person. The rest of the process was described in this response I gave previously. Overall a very good hiring process with clear communication!

2. This is an interesting question and I think it may need some more context to fully answer! There's some documentation here: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_oop/handle-class-destructors.html and if you run into this again or want a more complete answer / support never hesitate about reaching out to our support :) [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) tldr is that destructors on a handle object may not run if something is still referencing it, and app shutdown is a little tricky but I'd rely on handling cleanup specifically in an onCleanup call to be safe (https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/oncleanup.html)

3. I don't have specific domain knowledge or recommendations, but please don't hesitate to refer to the EDG hiring page here: https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/students/edg.html ! If you have any follow-ups feel free to ask them here as well.

Thanks Mike for the link! I'll second his comment.

Especially in a world where agentic tooling is increasingly relevant and MATLAB is so hooked into those workflows, having coding standards is extremely useful! It's noted in the link Mike sent, but there are some AI-specific rules that may be useful for agentic development as well: https://github.com/matlab/rules/tree/main

(Coding guidelines for AI is linked here: https://github.com/matlab/rules/blob/main/matlab-coding-standards.md )

I'm so glad to hear Simulink is up there for you! Learning about it as part of training was mind-boggling.

Regarding your questions:

1. There's actually very solid parity between MATLAB Online and desktop MATLAB as far as I know. Here's a page describing the limitations of MATLAB Online: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-online/limitations.html

It seems to be fairly consistent with the Desktop release, with only a couple of hardware-specific development workflows that may be more limited in the online version (also storage is potentially more limited as it's stored on the cloud). You can give it a try for free as well to test it out before making the switch to a Googlebook!

1. It's great to hear that you're interested in sim development and have clearly had experience with Simulink! While MathWorks doesn't offer high school level internships, there are really great opportunities to hone your skills and get practice in the field through hackathons and student competitions: https://www.mathworks.com/academia/students/competitions.html

EDG internships generally require you to be pursuing a degree in college, but when that time comes don't hesitate to apply here: https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/students/internships.html

On a personal note, taking time in high school to pour my soul and time into competitions and individual projects that were both technically challenging and interesting to me was extremely beneficial when the time came to look for internships. You're at a great time to learn, compete, and grow, and by developing those passions and skills now you're setting yourself up very well for internships during college. Keep up the good work and stay excited! There are always interesting things to do with a tool like Simulink.

This is a very interesting idea! Could you touch a little bit more on the interoperability element? I'm very interested in hearing about workflows you've used that would benefit from this kind of behavior being built-in for Markdown in MATLAB.

I briefly described the interview process in this response to u/Final-Thought-525, but to answer your questions on specific types of questions / preparation here are my thoughts on three tasks I think are relevant and their associated preparation methods:

Task: Prepare to answer Leetcode-style questions, but most importantly (in my opinion), prepare to explain the why behind your answer. There's a lot of value in being able to communicate why you're making the decisions you're making and the thought process behind that.

Preparation: Practice leetcode out loud! Whenever I would be solving a Hackerrank or Leetcode problem on my own, talking to myself as if I was talking out my explanation to an interviewer can get you in the right headspace and used to not just being silent. Even if you're feeling stuck and go to Google something (in practice, not during the interview obviously), practice how you would tell an interviewer that you're stuck. The more you're used to communicating what's going on in your head during a technical interview, the easier it'll be to get all that good thinking out of your head and into the notes of the interviewer during the real thing.

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Task: Prepare to answer all sorts of questions about your resume. If you think about it, all they know about you is what's on that sheet of paper and your online assessment responses. I'd want to learn more about the interesting stuff you've shared so far too!

Preparation: Absolutely re-read your resume. You may feel familiar with the stuff you've put on there, but trust me, it's easy to forget details, and a refresher never hurts! Being able to explain and elaborate on the projects or work you've done, as well as being able to explain some major "why" questions on those topics is great. Something I did to some solid success was explaining to a friend every part of my resume during peak interview season. It helps if they're inquisitive and don't know anything about the content, as getting any kind of practice answering questions gets you in the right headspace.

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Task: Know your own story. Even writing that feels a little odd and like you're going to fictionalize yourself, but remember that all of non-fiction is stories too. Being able to efficiently communicate the who, what, why, and how of yourself can be extremely helpful during manager and HR rounds (the more "behavioral" rounds).

Preparation: Think about some of the questions that you might get in a behavioral interview, you can either brainstorm from personal experience or look at online resources. I recommend taking these questions and having a couple of pre-set answers for these that you can pull out reliably. This is definitely not to say you should have fake pre-rehearsed answers, but having a single sentence that you can reach for to kick off a longer discussion of when you've run into teammate conflict can really save you when you're 3-4 hours deep in interviews for the day. TLDR for this: have some go-to examples, but don't feel like you need to rehearse lines. A structured response with a clear example will already be much more effective at conveying what you're trying to convey than a great response content-wise that doesn't have a good structure.
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Ok that was a lot. I hope this is at all helpful for anyone reading, and keep in mind that this is just what works best for me, and I recommend practice practice practice to find what works for you! Feel free to DM or comment again with any more questions!

I applied for full-time without doing an internship with MathWorks previously, so this answer is regarding that! If you're wanting more info on the internship process, I'll point you to this wonderful answer from Jaisohn (another MathWorker who did a similar AMA last year): https://www.reddit.com/r/matlab/comments/1obk67v/comment/nklq4z0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Ok, start my opinion:

The interview experience was overall very good. I had the first round of recorded interview questions and the online assessment (LeetCode-style questions).

After this round, an EDG manager reached out and conducted a first-round "phone-screening." This was a quick chat going over my resume and giving an overview of the role itself (as EDG isn't exactly an off-the-shelf SWE position).

After this, I had a final round that consisted of a 2 hour technical interview, a 45 minute interview with an EDG manager (in my case it was the same manager as had reached out previously), and a 45 minute HR interview.

Re: the technical interview: I always enjoyed being able to talk things out, so having the opportunity to be talking while I work on a technical problem was huge at this stage.

Don't worry if you don't get everything perfectly right during this stage, the interview isn't just about whether or not you can solve the problem, it's about how you think about it, and sometimes more importantly: how you communicate that thinking.

Re: the EDG manager interview: this was closer to the kind of behavioral interview that you might expect at other companies. This was another chance to show communication skills, and is a great opportunity to learn more about the company as well! During interviews, it's just as important for you to learn more about MathWorks as it for them to learn about you.

Everyone during the interview process was extremely helpful, and always happy to answer my questions. This was by far my favorite interview process that I had during my full-time job search.

Great question! While I can't exactly talk about what we're cooking up right now, I can happily discuss some of the stand-out AI related projects we've recently released to keep an eye on!

1. MATLAB and Simulink Agentic Toolkits: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-agentic-toolkit.html - A set of skills and tools for agents to effectively work with MATLAB and Simulink!

2. MATLAB MCP Server: https://github.com/matlab/matlab-mcp-server - The actual system that connects your agent to MATLAB and allows them to start/stop/execute/evaluate in MATLAB

3. MATLAB Agent SDK: https://github.com/matlab/matlab-ai-agent-sdk - SDK for building and running your own AI agents in MATLAB

And for general utility, you can have your terminal actually in the MATLAB Editor! https://github.com/matlab/terminal-in-matlab - this is super helpful for AI workflows involving the editor

And my personal favorite: MATLAB Local Quickstart

https://github.com/matlab/matlab-local-agent-quickstart - This is an extremely streamlined workflow to get yourself set up with agentic work in MATLAB at any scale, without needing to know the ins-and-outs of agents. This is a great starting point for just feeling what it's like to work agentically in MATLAB (which turns out to be very powerful!)

Note: lots of these are released on GitHub and have regular updates, so I'd recommend checking in on them to see what's new on a more regular basis than what you might be used to with MATLAB twice-per-year releases.

https://preview.redd.it/e7qv9h8twnwh1.png?width=1548&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fb985c2eedad48a55e50d6ebb05eb996a878384

Haha good question. MathWorks is very generous with their perks with things like free food, a gym, and free tickets to places like the Museum of Science in Boston. (Why Museum of Science?)

Personally, the biggest office perk for me is actually having an office :)

This may sound odd, but the benefit of being surrounded daily by people who are just as engaged in the same work and the same world as me is a huge boon. Turns out there are a lot of really smart people with lots of domain knowledge here, so as a student coming out of a field that isn't exactly engineering, being able to sponge up conversations with incredible MathWorkers has been such a pleasure!

(The wide assortment of tea options is pretty great too, they even have my all-time favorite: hojicha!)

You can refer to a more comprehensive list here as well: https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/resources/benefits.html

These are great ideas! Thanks so much for providing these thoughts. When you say "have a very easy markdown only view," do you have specific workflows you've used with Markdown that you've felt this paint point in?

I'd love to hear about any workflows you've used or thought about that use Markdown and MATLAB Editor!

Could you describe what you mean by roadmap a little bit more? I have a few different levels of roadmap I think about so I just want to make sure I'm answering the question you're asking :)

Hey! Good job getting the assessments done. I don't have direct access or visibility into the hiring system, so I can't confirm what that status means, though I definitely remember there being a delay between finishing the assessments and having folks reach out directly (a week or two sounds about in line with my experience).

If it's only been a week or under I'd let the status be and wait (though I definitely acknowledge that this isn't exactly a fun thing to just sit back on and wait for :/ ).

You're doing everything you can, so sticking with the process and focusing on what you've got direct control over is a winning strategy. Good luck!

Hmm, I think there are a couple directions my mind goes for this question. While MathWorks has always excelled at hitting the right level of abstraction for a given engineering flow (i.e., Simulink), I feel like having the underpinning of MATLAB code being that atomic foundation for those complicated workflows is really critical.

I think the space of AI-powered abstraction layers built on that foundation is extremely compelling though! The same kinds of development flows that are enabled by AI have clearly benefitted from having dedicated tools that act as abstraction layers between the atomic units of code and the natural language interface that AI offers (looking at you Cursor). I love the idea of no-code tools that leverage AI for development, but not as a replacement for the whole tool.

No-code has historically been great for quick and dirty prototypes, and now with the advent of AI those prototypes can get much quicker and much less dirty, but I believe there remains a need for folks to be able to work at the basic level of MATLAB code, especially because our customers are so diverse in their needs!

Love this question!!! Demos are among my favorite things, so I'm sorry but I can't just sit at one answer, I have to give two.

1. STEM education was something I always loved engaging with growing up, and one of the first demos I saw when getting introduced to Scratch (shoutout!) was a Rubiks cube. I couldn't play with it, but just seeing a rotating 3D object was so wild to me in elementary school. That's why I loved seeing Joren Heit's Rubiks cube solver.

It reminded me of seeing the power of coding early on in my life, and it's so fun to see how MATLAB has inspired other students in STEM ed. I know this sounds like an ad but I genuinely think MathWorks does a pretty stellar job of supporting STEM education!

1. When I was onboarding onto MATLAB we also do Simulink trainings, and I remember seeing this quadcopter drone example (https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2026a/sps/ug/quadcopter-drone.html). It blew me away to see every little element that came together to make this an effective project, from getting real-time weather data to seeing just how deep model-based-design can be, this was an all-timer for introducing me to the complexity of the MATLAB, Simscape, and Simulink ecosystem.

If you want to see more cool demos here are a couple resources:

https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2025/07/12/my-favorite-matlab-demos/ (From MATLAB's inventor Cleve)

https://github.com/mikecroucher/awesome-MATLAB (A list from Mike Croucher, a big advocate for all the cool stuff people do in MATLAB)

ok... explain matrices now... uh oh! looks like I have a meeting, I guess I'll have to explain matrices another time ;)

That's an interesting perspective, and definitely one I've seen broadly across software. While there are incredible tools out there being made in open-source efforts, MATLAB has always provided a unique value proposition of reliability.

From the early days of making matrix calculation software to being the go-to validation and verification solution for commercial avionics, we've built a lot of trust on being the software that is "right" at the end of the day. This is something that I've seen all over the place here; we even have a training scheduled for all new EDG hires from our CEO Jack Little titled "Jack's Quality Talk!"

While those alternatives definitely are cropping up I'd argue that the real value from MATLAB comes from our ecosystem, our technical support (reach out whenever btw no matter how small the problem!), and our persistent focus on being a kind of quality-standardized bedrock for scientists and engineers to make real progress on.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this as well!

I unfortunately can't give free licenses (however much I'd love to 😭), but there are a couple of different kinds of licenses that aren't quite as expensive as the standard license! (Also a free one for MATLAB Online if you just want to dip your toes in!)

Students have access to the student license:
https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/student.html

And for purely personal use there's the home license:

https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home.html

And there's a free option for MATLAB Online which I didn't know about until recently:

https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-online/matlab-online-versions.html

The Teams meetings get interesting when I forget to turn it off :)