End of Summer Reflection - Part I

        This is almost the end of the internship, and I wanted to take this time to reflect on my overall experience, answering selected blog prompts from the CS Department.

Were your expectations for this experience realistic?  Why or why not?

        I am extremely proud to say that I am at a stage in my life where I enter new experiences with minimum expectations. I have been burnt before by having my expectations not match the reality, and I learned to have a more realistic approach in life. The expectations I had were minimum: good team cooperation, strong leadership, and a lot of learning. These were reasonable expectations as I have never worked as a Research Assistant and an open-source developer before. So, yes, my expectations were realistic, and they have been mostly met.

What have you done that you didn’t ever think you would be able to do?

        I always underestimate myself as a coder and a software developer. This internship has shown how much I enjoy the software development process, and that I am actually good at it. I was surprised towards the end of the internship by my enthusiasm to spend hours writing scripts and solving visualization problems in Pandas.

What changes would you make if you had the chance to do this over again?

        Overall, I live by the mantra that everything happens for a reason. However, if I were to model this experience for someone with my characteristics, I would definitely put them in a pair programming team. I believe that I would have felt much better about my work and the overall experience had I always had a partner to work and reflect with, and learn from.

What would you do differently in this organization if you were the boss/owner?

        Overall, I liked our leadership team. The change that I would make is definitely creating an environment where the new cohort is encouraged to speak more than the old cohort. Often times the younger students would reflect on their days only after the older students have gone. This created a shortage of new and exciting information to share for the younger students, and I think it is a really big deal for the younger students. Another change I would implement is a better documentation of all the changes that need to be made because oftentimes the teams were told one thing, and later completely another. Documenting all of the ideas and double-checking them with the leadership team would eliminate this problem.

Think about a new career option that you learned about through this organization.  Research that career and write about it.

        Operations Research. I have already done thorough research on the job and can report that it is something I would love to do for a company. The job entails working with applied mathematic on optimization problems. It is an essential job for any business, because it not only saves money but can majorly reduce an environmental footprint, e.g. OR has helped the airline industry to reduce the amount of fuel burnt by minimizing routes and maximizing the number of people serves at once.