Internship season was difficult as a freshman. At career fairs, recruiters would often dismiss my skills and abilities upon hearing the number of years I had spent in college. Fortunately, one company acknowledged my skills during career fair and interview process - UPS.

The Internship

During my internship, I worked in a team of three other interns on the Network Planning Tool. We worked in a scrum environemnt, together with a scrum master, product manager, and consultants.

Our team worked to augment the NPT with different functionalities. I designed RESTful APIs using Controller-Service-Repository Architecture, URI endpoints, and HTTP requests on the frontend to interact with these APIs. These APIs were build using Spring Tools Suite, and the front end as built in angular.

Not only did I have the opportunity to work on backend code that accessed databases using SQL, I also worked on frontend parts of the NPT, written in Angular 6.

After developing each feature, we would hold code reviews as well with our consultant. I learned that UPS has their own code standard for both frontend and backend.

The experience taught me alot about time management and meeting scrum deadlines. I also learned to predict the time it would take to develop each step of our work. During that same summer, I taught my coworker how to code in Angular and Java, drawing on my experiences as a teaching assistant for CS 17700. Some days, we would spend hours of our day working on the white board to figure out solutions and figure out our workflow.

Working with a team of interns, consultants, and a memorable scrum master made the experience impactful, enriching, and memorable for me.

The Hackathon

One Friday, UPS held an optional hackathon where we develop a product idea for UPS to put into practice. I got together with a group of three of my coworkers, and we built a prototype of a blockchain technology that could be implemented in UPS.

We spent hours on the whiteboard trying to understand blockchain. Specifically, what were the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain over database technology? Using Spring Boot backend and HTML/Javascript frontend, we created a visualization of the blockchain that UPS could use in order to keep a transparent account of records.

We worked on our final presentation before the 24 hours had ended. I assumed a leadership role as time got tight, writing large portions of the presentation and delegating tasks to each of my teammates. We were able to present our idea to a board of UPS employees. Though unsuccessful in the hackathon, the experience taught me much about a technology that I was not familar with and participating in a company hackathon.

Living in Louisville, Kentucky

Living in Louisville with my roomate from Purdue was a great experience. I attended an intern event where I had the opportunity to network with other Louisville interns and listen to the mayor of Louisville. On another occasion, my roomate and I explored downtown Louisville, visiting the Louisville Bats museum and seeing the Muhammad Ali Center.

Ending work around 5 PM gave me time to work on a personal project - developing my first personal website. I assisted my roommate in building his own website as well, teaching him the basics of HTML and CSS.

Outside of work with some coworkers, we explored local trails on hikes. We even watched a baseball game in the Louisville Bats stadium. Our team lost, but it was well worth the experience. We also had the opportunity to volunteer at the Dare to Care food bank and learn about different types of donated food and where it goes to help others.