I started my Fall Internship at a local finance company as a software engineer intern last week (as mentioned in my previous blog post). This was a backend engineering position which was great because I had no real-life experience with backend engineering.
I experienced a different work style and social culture for the companies I have interned at. When I interned at Walmart this summer, the workload was very light while support from mentors were more hands-off, letting the intern to figure out how to solve their tasks on their own. I was given an intern project where I had to build a whole new dashboard in Angular, a framework I have never worked with. They just told me to look through the codebase and reference previously written codes while working on this project. This gave me a lot of freedom to explore the technology and the codebase and learn how to finish the project on my own. There were daily standups with the whole team where I just explain my progress and discuss roadblocks. At the end, I was able to successfully finish my project on time and took on additional tickets/tasks to work on for the rest of my internship.
At my current company, the workload is much heavier than Walmart. Since the company is relatively smaller, they have less engineers and resources to complete all the planned projects. As an intern, I wasn’t given an intern project to finish during the duration of the internship, rather I was given tasks across multiple projects to aid the senior software engineer on completing those projects on time. I am currently working on two different projects with multiple tasks for each project. My mentor and team is very supportive through my progress but it is less organized than my experience at Walmart. There are constantly last-minute meetings scheduled and a lot of manual work that doesn’t require coding. It’s already my second week but I feel slightly micro-managed and stressed out of the workload.
The experience you gain from internships is very important to an aspiring software engineer’s professional success. Through internships, not only do you learn various technologies but also learn how to effectively work with a team. It is also a great opportunity to learn more about yourself – your learning style and your work style. You learn about the culture of different companies and it will help understand what kind of company you would like to work like in the future. I believe it is very important to join a company with a culture that matches your workstyle and learning style – a very important part of your success throughout your career.
