Internship Spotlight: The importance of asking questions

Tell me about your internship! What are your responsibilities? What projects are you working on over the summer?

I’m working on Instagram Direct on the web, which is their messaging platform on Instagram.com. Currently, I’m working on a couple of features that are on the direct messaging platform. I will hopefully be able to ship it out to the public by the end of my internship.

What is the most important thing you have learned thus far?

The most important thing that I’ve learned is to ask questions and never to be afraid to ask questions. There is never really a wrong question or a right question; if you are really confused about something, it's way better to ask than to be blocked by yourself or to be confused. At META, it's kind of an unwritten rule that you shouldn't be blocked for more than 30 minutes. If you go and seek help, working on it with someone is a lot better than trying to tackle it by yourself.

How did your school work prepare you for this role?

I think that the classes that helped me the most for this internship would be CSCI 1133 and CSCI 5117. I think CSCI 1133 was the most helpful because it was the first computer science class that I took in college and it covers foundational concepts. It helped me understand programming languages as a whole. CSCI 5117 was helpful for full-stack development and frameworks. That course helped me a lot because my text stack currently is in React so I was able to use that to help me with my internship. I think the way that I became better at computer science was by doing projects outside of school and attending hackathons around the US. I also went to Minne Hack, and it forced me to learn different text stacks and to become good at coding in a short amount of time. Because of the hackathon's time constraints, they’re normally 24 to 36 hours to come up with something and present. They helped me become better at computer science.

How did you become interested in computer science and your specific areas of interest?

In high school, I jumped around for a long time trying to decide what to do. When I was younger, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon because I was inspired by a movie I watched. Then I figured out that maybe that's not the best path for me since it does take a long time in school. Then I thought about maybe business, and finally, I decided on computer science because both my parents are software engineers and they kind of encouraged me to explore that path. When I came to the University of Minnesota and took my first class in computer science, I ended up enjoying it and I decided that this was the major for me.

What are your future career goals? How has this position impacted your goals?

For my future career goals, I want to work in the industry and work in a top tech company, because I would be surrounded by really smart people, and I can learn from them. This internship is giving me that experience. So many people have much more knowledge than me and it has been nice to be able to shadow them and learn what they are doing. It has also given me experience working as a software engineer. In hackathons, you kind of do whatever you need to make sure your product works, but here it's a system and testing that makes the product function well. I think that one day I want to create a start-up, so bringing these principles that I learned with me from my jobs will be helpful.

What advice would you give to someone pursuing a similar internship in the future?

I would say take advantage of the resources we have on the internet and at school and never stop learning. If you approach any internship or any job with that kind of mindset, then you will be set up for success. If you never stop learning, then your knowledge will expand even more and you'll become an even better engineer because of it.