A Summer at GBC - A People Retrospective
Looking back at the summer of 2026, and and sharing some of the gratitudes for the people I've had the immense pleasure of being able to work with.
Life update! Last week, I concluded my first ever Co-op term with the General Bank of Canada!
I had an amazing time, learned a ton, and I wanted to make a post to make a few thank-yous to some of the people who I worked with (and get ready because this post is a doozy).
Firstly, and I should start from the beginning…
HR
a huge, huge, huge thank you to the HR function, Jess Nguyen & Hailey Roebuck for an amazing turn-around time! You guys turned a student who was feeling quite low after 400+ applications, 15+ interviews and no solid internship in his future to a person starting his first onboarding modules with 2 days! It was genuinely an amazing turn around, and it helped keep me on pace to make sure I got the most out of the opportunity despite a slightly later start than some of my other peers!
The Team
Next, and I can’t stress this enough, every single person in the ECS team who I worked under was awesome. They were friendly, knowledgeable, and most importantly always willing to listen to and answer my questions (whether or not they were related to work or what their weirdest food combo was is up for debate…).
I would like to start by giving a big, big shout-out to Cory Spence and Denisse Deliso-Mascqueset!! If you want someone to blame, they turned me from a person who could basically only describe what the IT stood for in ITSM to a ticket destroying monster. This opportunity being the success it was would not have been possible without their careful planning and deliberations over what system-destroying permissions they could give to the intern and so for that I have a lot of appreciation. From teaching me what it meant to handle ITSM (with a heavy focus on the S), to going out of their way to take an hour to answer random questions I had, I would have not emerged with nearly as much knowledge nor ability, were they not there to guide me along each step of the way!
I also want to give shorter (but still specific) shout outs to everyone else in the ECS team! Thank you to Rahul Dhingra for sharing with me your extensive knowledge about working in the IT space. I always appreciated you being there, for me to turn my chair and ask for you to take a look when I had no clue what was going on. Thank you to Gurminder Singh for always having a great attitude towards all of the team-building I suggested and always having fun answers to the questions I asked him, and then also being a reliable resource whenever I needed help working with some of Microsoft’s more…confusing cloud resources.
I also want to extend a big thanks to Kenneth Chan and Darren Enders, who helped show me some of the technical side of maintaining a company’s on-prem and cloud infrastructure and kind of show me more about fields that I was interested to learn in. To Darren, i6t was awesome to see the homelab set-up and I am definitely looking forward to trying to emulate some of the cooler things you showed me on the homelab I’m building right now! To Trysten Meunier, thank you for giving me a few hour long lectures on building good looking front-ends! While I am still not skilled at it, but being able to pick your brain and listen to the number of cool thoughts you had about user-centered design really will help in my future within designing my products!
The Others
I also want to extend a thanks to Eric Dillon, for showing me a piece of what it means to be a leader of a Schedule One bank in Canada! I will bring forward with me some really insightful conversations about the future of technology in the banking industry and an important statistic about ties in the workplace (7 Percent)! And lastly, to my fellow interns, thank you to Udit Janarathan and Prithvi Masanghani for the most enlightened of conversations I’ve ever had while wearing business attire. To Rafid Chowdury for opening my eyes to the peak that is One Piece, to Kaitlynn Robertson for helping me beat some of the 4-5pm boredom, and to everybody else who helped make this summer unforgettable.
There are definitely some names I’m forgetting but all in all, working at GBC was an awesome experience and I look forward to applying everything I’ve learned from here. If we worked alongside one another directly, indirectly, or we had a conversation about something interesting, I want to say thank you for helping shape my first ever co-op experience, and I hope that our paths intersect again in the future!