A few days ago I was offered and then accepted a full-time software engineering position where I am currently working as an intern for the past 5 months. As I near the end of the internship, I’ve been asked to report on my overall experience. I applied for the software engineering position in late March, and was offered an opportunity to apply for an internship a few days afterwards. I went through 3 meetings – a 30-minute informational meeting with an engineering manager, an hour-long technical interview with 2 engineers, and then a meeting with another engineering manager when I was informed I would be offered the internship. In mid-May I accepted the position.\u00a0I was really grateful because I had applied to several summer internships the summer before and was not offered even one position. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have been in education the past ~25 years (teaching math\/CS, facilitating PD) and was a CS high school teacher for 6 years before my internship began. I have never worked outside of an educational setting so this internship felt like I was starting over again as if I was a fresh college grad!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although a remote position, engineers are expected to attend several recurring meetings:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was initially working within a smaller team of about 4-6 engineers and manager. But recently 2 of the teams merged into 1 team with size 9 people (engineers, manager, and product manager). I prefer the smaller size because we’re able to talk more in-depth about our tasks and issues. With 8-10 people, you just want to go quickly to not hold up everyone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was assigned 2 big projects which I was able to solve successfully (big sigh relief). The first project was a relatively familiar one to a lot of engineers and when I was able to resolve, my manager asked me to demonstrate the solution during a monthly demo meeting. I was quite nervous, but afterwards, the CTO reached out to me and congratulated me on it which was very cool!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have worked on various tasks, and I think that the common denominator among tasks I enjoy is the collaboration. I enjoy discussing different approaches with my peers and messaging on Slack back and forth about different problems\/issues. For my second task, I had to upgrade a package that not many current engineers are familiar with. It was the least enjoyable part of my internship because I hesitated to reach out to others knowing it was a heavy lift since most did not have the context. But eventually, I did meet with my mentor and spent about 45 minutes explaining the background. Afterwards, he gave me some fantastic insight, and it was worthwhile. Also, it increased the bus factor<\/a> of the project!<\/p>\n\n\n\n My internship ends on November 18, and then my full-time position begins on November. I am 5 months shy of 50 years old and about to embark on a completely new career pathway. And I’m really looking forward to it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few days ago I was offered and then accepted a full-time software engineering position where I am currently working as an intern for the past 5 months. As I near the end of the internship, I’ve been asked to report on my overall experience. I applied for the software engineering position in late March, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12806,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12806"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/fisheali\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}