Week 2 (June 17 - June 21)

A past experience that I found especially useful in this internship is the Databases course that I took during spring 2024. In that course, we had to collaborate with real clients who wanted a database system and we had to build it using Flask, which is similar to what we are doing in our internship with the CELTS program. The main difference is that CELTS is already established and has the major parts already working, meaning we are just maintaining and enhancing it whereas in the database class, we had to design it by creating business rules, entities and their attributes, assigning cardinalities, deciding the relationships between each entity , and how the website itself will look like.

Having prior knowledge about databases and how to design one using business rules, cardinalities, and entity relationship diagrams helped, especially with the current issue that I am working on with my partner, which involves having to track the relationship that one of the tables in the model has with other tables to understand the root cause of the issue. After creating an entity relationship diagram, we decided to solve the issue by adding a new column to the table and make modifications on the way the user would see the page. Although this is an ongoing issue, I have already learned so much from my partner, who had more experience and expertise on the front end with HTML, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. He was able to figure out how to create modals and buttons a lot faster than I could and, in a way, we complement each other because I understood the functions and routes in the controller a lot better than front end, so I was able to help more in that area. Our main issue eventually was to try to bring the changes made on front end and back end together, which we are still have not figured out.

A past experience where I learned a lot about leadership is when I did a management internship last summer and I had to work with various managers at my internship location. After seeing all their different style of leading, I was able to see that the most effective one was the manager who asked his associates for their views and opinions on things and delegated lower-level tasks to the associates, which gave the associates opportunities to learn new things and also gave the manager more time to spend on bigger issues instead of wasting time on tedious little tasks. I was able to apply his method just for a leadership position, but in general cases where I have to work with teammates and partners. I always try to remember that there is always something I can learn from another person and even if it seems like I know more about certain topics, I should always listen to my teammate(s) because they may be able to see something I do not. Following this rule in my current internship has helped a lot in how I position myself because my current partner and I usually either do not agree on things or have differing ways of trying to solve the problems we have encountered. Our differing opinions also has helped a lot with generating ideas and detecting problems faster because whenever my partner and I discuss a problem and explain to each other our views and concerns, we end up realizing things that we both we not think of by ourselves. The structure of the CS courses here at Berea, where classes are teamwork based, also helped a lot with dealing with a situation where I have to work with someone whose views are generally different from mine because the more that I had to work with multiple classmates, the more I get used to working with people with all sorts of opinions.