Hello!
My name is Laura Edington and I’m a rising senior at Tulane University, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Economics. My interest in computer science first began my senior year of high school when I took an AP Computer Science course. Before this course, I had never encountered programming, and since this course, I have never looked back! I continued to pursue computer science courses throughout college. Fortunately this summer I applied and received a software engineering internship with Skanatek AB. This internship is unique for me for several reasons. The first reason being that it is remote; that is, I work from my laptop at home. The second reason being the structure of the internship itself. There are two phases to the internship. The first phase is an independent study; that is, the intern is assigned five tasks which he or she must complete on his or her own and submit them by the designated deadlines. The only contact made with the company is through daily e-mail reports detailing what the intern has done during that day. Upon successful completion of the first phase of the internship, the intern is transitioned to the second phase of the internship during which he or she will receive support from and have direct communication with company team members via Skype and online portals.
Interesting, eh? I think so too, and I’m pretty excited to start. Although there is a definite benefit to working in an office environment with your supervisor and coworkers only a few cubicles away, I am looking forward to the challenge of time management, independent learning, and of course graduating to the second phase. Another benefit? I get to continue living in the city I call home while still gaining technical and professional experience.
I know that the experience and knowledge I gain from this internship will be much more than five bullet points, but for the purpose of clear goals here are my five main learning objectives for the summer:
- Improve programming skills to industry standard
- Increase understanding of software development in large distributed systems
- Enhance independent learning abilities and independent problem solving skills
- Learn to communicate and manage my time professionally
- Learn to collaborate effectively online and on other developers’ code, since I know this skill will transfer to open source software development
If you are interested in following my summer work adventures, please feel free to check up on my GitHub account where I upload my progress and assignments for the internship daily. This link will take you directly to the folder I created for this internship: https://github.com/ledingto/internship-assignments
Until next time,
Laura 🙂