A Summer in Tech

For students the end of exams and the start of the summer break is a well-deserved chance to take time to relax and reflect on the year past. But for those - like me - who have restless feet, an internship can be a great way to spend a summer and gives you an opportunity to explore your future career and gain a new perspective on all those skills you’ve learned.

Have you ever seen those movies where a steam train is pulling away from a station and the hero is chasing after it? He’s closing the gap, but the train is building up speed. At the last moment before the train escapes the hero reaches out and grabs the railing on the last carriage.

To me, pursuing a career in tech has always felt like this cinema cliché.  Tech as an industry is a train that stops for no one. Always moving. Always accelerating. The hardest part is just getting on.

And this is where Vista’s great intern program can really help those software engineering students who enjoy a challenge. At Vista, interns are thrown in at the deep end, placed in one of the development teams.

In my case, I was paired up with a team building a new web-based ticket aggregation API. This was a great opportunity to see how a development team lives in the wild. Vista assembles its development teams to be autonomous units. This means that you get to work closely with developers, testers, business analysts, and technical writers among others. It’s also an introduction to the zoo of technologies that goes into building and maintaining a complex application.

But just as you’re beginning to get comfortable with your new surroundings, all the interns are grouped into teams to work on a brand-new project. Many of these intern projects will find their way into the Vista ecosystem and be used by customers or developers. This was a chance to put to work all the things I had learned from teams in a project I could call my own. My team was tasked with building a new documentation search engine. It was my first time building a full stack application and working with real stakeholders and it was a fantastic learning experience.

If you are starting an internship soon – or even just thinking about it – here are a few tips. Firstly, prepare to immerse yourself in a world where you know nothing. This might seem scary and it was a feeling that took me some time to get used to. The people you work with have decades of experience in tech and at least to begin with you will struggle to keep up. Accept this and use it as an opportunity to learn as much as possible.

Be open to learning about areas of expertise outside your own. Even if your interest is solely in software development, you will still find plenty of value in understanding other areas of your company. This will help you understand the context of the work you are doing and elevate your experience.

Finally, take what you’ve learned during your work experience back to university. Share all the things you have learned with your friends and peers and apply the skills you have learned in other projects.

So, for those of you who are thinking about doing an internship, get out there. Apply. You will find it will give you a leg up and put into context what you are studying at university. It is worth your time, and I can’t think of a more welcoming place to get started than at Vista.