How Did I Get This Internship

Through perseverance and not letting that feeling of not having an internship get to me. This is actually my second internship with the same company. The first time I interned, I didn’t have an internship for the whole summer but continued to apply, even as late into August. That’s how I landed this job that was close to school and allowed me to work part-time while going to school. After a quarter of doing that, I was offered to return again in the summer and I took the job.

The methods I went through to get this internship was constantly applying online and having alerts directed to my phone helped me stay on track on job openings. I had updated resumes that fit to the company’s job description and applied to those where I felt my skills fitted. For me, the technical parts of the interview are toughest so I focus on that in preparation.

Description

This week, I was blocked from completing my main task, which was to create a warm DB instance on a VM server build pipeline. Instead, I was trusted to work on the defect backlog and choose defects to work on – ranging from pagination issues to GUI errors on their application. Along with that, I decided to do some refactoring because the code base seemed pretty dated (porting from a previous Java version to Java 8).

I also ran into a major blocker trying to deploy the server on my local machine. What was happening was my codebase was not compatible with the server that I had to run on so I had to reinstall the applications in order to get the code synced up.

Analysis

Being able to work on things like defects gives me a totally new experience. I am taking something that someone previously thought that worked, and tweaking it a bit to make sure it works in the big picture. It gives me a different perspective on how to solve problems and to think deeper about when I implement a new feature in a side project or at work. Will this feature stay working in the long run? How do I ensure that this method does what it is supposed to do in the context of the application, and how do I keep it that way?

About this week’s theme, I feel like it is a pressure to get that first internship. I mean, we spend so much time working and studying at universities that we should all be able to get one. But really that is not the case, especially reading about how everyone else got their internship. They really had to go out of their way outside of school or excel in different ways inside of school to get that prestigious first internship, and for that I commend everyone for their dedication.