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, because they are most likely going to face something that they are not familiar with because of how varying the issues are in the CELTS application. The more question they ask, the more they will learn and the faster they will be able to solve issues. It is good to spend a little time trying to research on their own first, but it is also important to realize the difference between actually researching something and not having any idea what they are researching or if they are even researching correctly because they do not understand the issue at all. If they do not understand the issue at all or know where to start their research, it is best to ask their supervisor first to explain the issue and get insight on how to get started. Lastly, they must be willing to adapt to changes, and in this internship, this is most often with partners. As their partners change, their work styles and personality will also be different, and it is important that they put in effort to try to make it work even if they do not get along very well with their partner, because they cannot keep avoiding people just because they do not share the same opinions.

This internship gave me more experience on the front end, especially with HTML and JavaScript, along with how the back end and front end are connected. In terms of software engineering, I think this provides a wider range of knowledge that I could really use to decide which areas that interests me. I have a better understanding of what it means to be a back end developer, front end developer, and full stack developer, which is a valuable information in deciding which path I would like to pursue or if I even want to pursue any of the three.

I feel like knowing more about front end and front end tools would have made me able to complete the issues a lot faster at the beginning of my internship. Although I still ended up learning a lot and am now more familiar with JavaScript and HTML, I think if I had been a little more familiar with it when I first came in, I would have been able to solve certain HTML problems a lot faster. There were some days that I spent hours trying to fix something on a page just for me to realize that all I had to do was change one line or just a section of one line. It was a valuable experience, but I could have built an even deeper knowledge of how the whole application work if I did not have to spend so much time learning front end with no prior knowledge.