Furry, Four-legged Coworkers? A Co-op Experience at Chewy

For some people, an office full of dogs may be nothing more than a dream. For third year student Megan Larson (BS, Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology ’21) that dream was her reality during the time she spent on co-op at Chewy – an eCommerce company that caters to anything pet-related.

Likening Chewy to an “Amazon for pets,” Megan says that the company’s distinguishing feature is its customer service. At the beginning of her co-op, which was located in Chewy’s Boston office, she was flown down to its customer service center, located in Florida. Megan describes how she “experienced firsthand how Chewy stands out from the other eCommerce behemoths.” She emphasizes that employees at the company “answer calls within seconds and hand write personalized holiday cards for every single one of their customers.”

As a fully integrated member of her team, Megan had the same responsibilities of every other Chewy engineer. For Megan, some of those responsibilities included the maintenance and development of the company’s intranet website for their customer service representatives and its main, customer-facing ‘storefront’ website. “With the support of my team, I built everything from User Interfaces for CSRs to relational databases to model new products,” reports Megan.

One of her favorite projects she completed at Chewy was the integration of a new package tracking service – she wrote some of the code. “To complete this project, I got to work with some new tech and become familiar with how Chewy manages firewalls and site security.” She adds, “It was an eye-opening experience.”

At Chewy, Megan was able to apply what she learned in her Khoury College courses directly to the projects she worked on. Most important among those skills she learned, she noted, was time management and teamwork – two skills that are essential in a productive workplace. While the Java skills she learned in Fundamentals II: Introduction to Class-based Program Design and Object-Oriented Design were instrumental to her success in her role, Megan says, “More than specific technical skills, my classes taught me time management and how to work well with a team – these two skills proved more important than anything else while working at Chewy.”

Megan says she really enjoyed the team she worked with, both her human and animal coworkers alike. “The best part of working at Chewy was definitely the people. I was always supported and never was nervous to ask for help,” says Megan. “The second-best part, however, was that employees could bring their dogs into the office. I’m a huge dog person, and it was just lovely to come to an office full of dogs every day!”