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 with not much familiarity in front end. Other goals that I still hope to achieve include figuring out whether or not being a software engineer is the career I want to pursue and being able to compare and contrast my current role to working at another company.

 

Since I first started this internship, I definitely think that I have more knowledge in programming in general, such as being able to locate where in the program I would need to make modifications to solve issues. I also feel more confident in working with HTML and JavaScript and debugging front end issues. As of right now, my contributions to the Celts organization include adding a new method in the courses file to display course names with the course abbreviation and course number, and adding a new feature that would allow events with multiple offerings to be added under one form and allow all related events to be tracked with a single ID.

I think my strongest trait as an intern is in my habit to research an issue in depth and trying to teach myself as much as I can before asking my supervisor for help. This way, I am able to learn more through research and I am also not asking for help for something I might be able to solve with more research.

 

My perception of work changed in that I started this internship with the idea that being a software engineer means coding the majority of the time, but I learned that it is actually primarily researching and there are even some days we end up not touching the code at all. This is because we are constantly facing issues that we have not yet encountered and before we can start to solve it, we must first understand what the real problem is and what the best method is to tackle the issue.

 

I discovered that the culture here at the student software development team is that we are all like one big family where we are all very open about the issues that we are working on, we are readily available to help one another, and we tend to do things in sync. I came this during our morning meetings where instead of lying about how we are doing, we are all very honest when we are stuck on an issue and are not embarrassed to admit that we are struggling. We also tend to take walks as a group during our breaks and openly ask around if people need help. This culture is very positive and helps us all be able to stay motivated because no one shaming anyone for taking too long to solve an issue nor for having fewer prior knowledge and experience.