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Final Reflection

At the start of this internship, a few of my goals included applying concepts from my CS curriculum onto this non-academic role, understanding the modern work environment and relating it to my personal career goals, using oral and written communication skills to present complex ideas, and experiencing and learning what it means to work in software development. Applying the skills and knowledge that I learned from my Berea College CSC courses came naturally since I had to use any prior knowledge I had to the best I can in order to try to solve coding issues. Skills and knowledge that I had to apply from the CS courses included pair programming, where we switched partners about every two weeks, using Python and back end programming logic, and also knowledge of databases. I also had to use written and oral communication when adding comments to the code that I write and when updating my co-workers and supervisors on my partner and I’s progress on the issue that we worked on during the morn...
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Week 8: July 29 - August 2

  Based on my experience with this internship, I would say the most important skills needed for an individual to be successful in this organization and in this role is to be willing to learn and try new things, asking lots of questions, and be willing to adapt to changes even if they do not feel comfortable at first. First of all, it is important to be very willing to try new things because they will get exposed to all sorts of tools that they may have never seen before and in that moment, it is more important that they are willing to learn those new tools than wishing that they had already learn it, because they cannot always already know things ahead of time. It may make them stay ahead of everyone else if they already knew all sorts of programming languages and tools, but if they are willing to learn new things, they can still end up with the same level of skill set even if they started barely knowing anything. Secondly, it is important that they are asking a lot of questions, b...
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Week 7 (July 22 - July 26)

A technical knowledge that I brought into this internship was my understanding of the logic of functions in the back end from the Berea Computer Science courses. This knowledge helped me better understand the way things were working in the back end in the CELTS application. I applied this knowledge when I was working to add the new feature in the create event page of the application. We had to new a new field into the event table in the models and modify the functions that currently existed in order to make sure that the new field is working as intended and also modify the tests so that they all pass and that the new features we added are being tested. My knowledge with understanding function logic helped me understand the process that existed before we added our feature and also helped me get a better idea of the changes I need to make in order for the tests to pass. I think that the biggest challenge that the majority of the team faced was adjusting to working with a new partner ab...
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Week 6 (July 15 - July 19)

Before starting my internship, the questions that I had were the difference between backend and frontend, what it means to be a software engineer, and if I would enjoy a career as a software engineer. From this internship, I learned that the front end is what the users interact with, and the back end is the logic that happen behind the scenes. I was also able to quickly figure out that I had the most experience with backend from the Berea College Computer Science courses and that I did not have a lot of knowledge in frontend at the beginning of the internship. The life of a software engineer in the real world would be very similar to my internship, except that there would probably be more strict deadlines because in this internship, we are given as much time as we need to learn as much as possible. I feel like I would enjoy a career like this internship for the most part since I enjoy researching about an issue that occurred in the application, figuring out why the issue occurred, and ...
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Week 5 (July 8 - July 12)

  Types of oral communication required at my internship include discussing with my programming partner on how I think we can solve an issue and letting them know what I think about their opinions. This is important because if partner and I are not aware of each other’s ideas and opinions, then we could be trying to implement two totally different things, which could mess up the whole code or be implementing the same thing, which would make our efforts be pointless since we both wasted our energy just to get to the same thing. It is best to discuss and work together so that we are not creating redundant code or are struggling by ourselves. Other oral communication include going to my supervisor to review a code that my partner and I have finished to get feedback on what we did well, what we need to fix, and why those changes are needed. This review process lets us know what our supervisor is looking for before he approves of our code and also lets us understand the considerations th...
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Week 4 (July 1 - July 5)

  In this internship, I have met my goal to experience what it is like to be a “software engineer” as I was able to see that the day-to-day workflow and workload depends on the issues that I chose to resolve with my partner. The pace that we solve each issue also depends on how hard or complex the issue is and the amount of prior knowledge that we have that is relevant to the issue. I also realized that maintaining a website exposes us to various languages and even if we started out with little experience, we would eventually end up knowing a little bit of everything. For example, this internship is the first time I have had to use JavaScript, HTML, and other front end related tools intensively in order to add a new feature into the program. As of right now, my goals have not changed much, and minor new goals include getting experience with solving issues in various areas of the Celts program and trying to become familiar with working both front end and back end, since I came in wi...
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Week 3 (June 24 - June 28)

  My experience with my internship colleagues definitely deepened my understanding of connecting the front-end development to the back-end development. Coming from a background where I do not have much front-end experience, such as working with JavaScript or HTML, the issue that I am working on right now was very confusing for me. My last partner, however, knew a lot about front end and was able to explain to me how Bootstrap and Jinja are used in the HTML file to design the page that users will see. He also explained about how JavaScript is used to control the behavior of the page and how to use it to collect the user inputs on the page so that we can store and further manipulate the data. This was a huge learning opportunity for me because for the first time, I was able to clearly see the difference between front end and back end, and why the logic and controller are needed so that data given by users matches the formats in the database and data given back to users are displayed ...
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