Internship in Review

Next week will be the last week of my internship at Benefitfocus! Wow, the summer has flown by. I am incredibly grateful for the skills I’ve gained and the knowledge shared with me by my colleagues. I thought it’d be wise to reflect on my time this summer and share my experiences!

How did you get your internship?

Getting an internship for this summer was a struggle. I had submitted 50+ applications throughout the school year and never got past the code challenge tests. Then, serendipity struck in the eleventh-hour!

In January, I was watching a coding stream on Twitch, hosted by Cassidy Williams, a developer advocate at Netlify and a personal inspiration of mine. She runs a Discord community of like-minded developers where members can go to seek career advice, comradery and friendship. In May, a fellow member of the community posted a message about a last-minute cyber security internship. I got in contact and had an interview scheduled for the next day.

After the interview, the member messaged me that they appreciated my interview, but wouldn’t be able to extend me an offer… But they forwarded my resume onto the Director of Software Engineering, James Wilson, with whom I had another interview the next morning. My interview went great and I was extended an offer later that day!

What a whirlwind of a process, from posting to offer in less than 48 hours! I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity I was presented.

What did you do during your internship?

This summer, I was placed on a UX scrum team with another intern, Karan. With the help of Hugo and Tan on our team, we tackled many bugs together and got valuable experience working on enterprise React applications.

We joined the team at a transition point between old leadership and new leadership, and the company has just recently changed direction to focus on modern cloud-ready tech stacks. For us, this meant we would continue working on legacy code bases, as well as contribute to the future direction of the company.

What was the most difficult aspect of your internship?

Testing.

Armed with Jest and React Testing Library, we were tasked with adding integration testing to some legacy applications. After climbing the initial mountain of setting up our local environments, we encountered the… joys of testing React applications. We struggled a lot with render timings. We’d expect() an element to be rendered after interacting with the application, but it hadn’t rendered quite yet.

That being said, testing is also the most satisfying and impactful parts of software development in my internship. The tests I added will be used for years to come to ensure that customers are always able to complete their routines in the application.

What advice do you have for incoming software development interns?

In the beginning, you won’t understand anything. My first week in sprint meetings, I understood <10% of the vocab being used. Stories, burn down, scrum. Huh!? But your knowledge will build slowly over time and soon, you’ll be making meaningful contributions! Don’t sweat it! Just aim to get a little better each week.

Ask tons of questions. Your mentors and managers are there to share knowledge with you. Have a question about the implementation? Not totally following with their code demo? Have an idea for how the current code could be improved? Speak up! Not only will you gain valuable skills, you’ll also demonstrate your attentiveness and creativity.

Increase your surface area for luck. You can’t control who hires you or give you an interview. What you can control is the number of channels through which good luck can come your way. I would have never gotten my internship if I hadn’t decided to put myself out there and join a Discord community. Submit lots of applications and eventually, good luck will come your way!

All in all, I’m sad the internship has ended so soon, but the experience and expertise I’ve gained has been invaluable. Thank you for reading!