Internship Spotlight: Learning to Communicate
Tell me about your internship! What are your responsibilities? What projects are you working on over the summer?
It's more traditional than just having a project, grinding it out, and having to report it to someone when the summer is over. I work directly with the team on any new software bugs or any software features, even some standard work practices like creating documents and workflows. To put it briefly, it's a full on integration to an agile team, I work on the same things like any fully salaried full-time engineer. I get to work with employees who work full-time; I have the same job as them, and work on bigger projects and bugs that are pressing.
What is the most important thing you have learned thus far?
Nobody knows everything, so adapting to changing circumstances and communication are really important skills regardless of seniority. It's all about problem-solving. Ultimately that's how you figure out your problem, because you have to talk to other people to solve those problems.
How did your school work prepare you for this role?
Some of the full-time people and my mentor often report that they are surprised to learn that some of the classes at the University of Minnesota cover some of the work we do. I would say the CSCI 3081W program development design course is helpful, because it has so many tools that are used in the industry today. I found that to be the case at my job too. I'd say a lot of the concepts, from product development design and CSCI 4061 operating systems, come up. You need to be dealing with industry-standard technologies and also have a really good knowledge of the material in that class like version control. It's really important to know some of the lower-level details, such as software maintenance and software design patterns. It depends on the software that I work on, because message queues are a really big deal; lots of web servers are really important in passing information in the software. I guess with my job specifically, the concepts in operating systems and the software life cycles that I learned from school are important.
How did you become interested in computer science and your specific areas of interest?
I never fully knew that I wanted to do computer science. That wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, but I have always enjoyed technology and computers. I took introduction classes and I was able to resonate with them, so I found myself thinking, “Wow this sounds powerful.” The limit is really how much you know and how much time you put into it. There's no limit on what you can decide to do and there is totally room for creativity too. If you have the means to do it and there are people around you who want to do the same thing, it's super contagious. You want to build things, you want to create things, then you’ll never want to leave. You learn these skills in computer science and I moved forward and got into those classes that delved more into specific software. I really grew to enjoy that process of learning.
What are your future career goals? How has this position impacted your goals?
It's interesting because my internship has given me a lot of exposure to very different aspects of software development and software design. So I’ve learned a whole side of things that's all about validation and authentication to make sure what you're doing is addressing what's happening, like system requirements or software requirements. Another side of things is development work, which is working on a new feature and fixing feature bugs. So in general, I learned that whole process, which is really cool.
I haven't figured out which side of things I want to be on, and it's even more complicated because there is some security stuff that I’m working on that I really like. The best way to put it is that it granted me a lot of exposure to different things and aspects of software development, and it's opening doors to different ones. I'm interested in them all, and this role is granting me exposure to different sides so that I can pick and choose. I did an internship to try one thing and see if I can go forward with that. It has allowed me to get the power to choose more.
What advice would you give to someone pursuing a similar internship in the future?
Applying to a lot of jobs is a big thing, but you get to a point where there are a lot of people applying who know how to do the job and have the skills to figure out all the problems they need to solve. I think it was my personality that allowed me to shine through, and of course, I had to pass a technical and I did just fine there.
A better way to frame it would be; If you have a sample size of 10 people who can solve the problem, and there's a few who don't elaborate well or don't have a personality that fits in the context of a team. They might not get chosen for the internship. I think I stood out in that way, I was able to speak to the interviewer like a person, it was a conversation versus an interrogation, and I think that's ultimately what got me into this role. I think that if someone wants to get this role or a similar role, they need to have an adaptable or flexible personality. I guess it just comes back to being someone who can work with a team.