Here's a look at how some students in the iSchool's Informatics program have been spending their summer.
Alice Yan
Interning as a UX designer at Udemy, an online education company in San Francisco
Q: What are you working on?
A: My project for this summer is a complete redesign of their current support site. If you take a look at the website right now, the UX is pretty bad. I'm tackling the project in three parts, User Experience, Information Architecture, and Content. If everything goes well, at the end of the internship, my project will be shipped and live on the site!
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of the internship?
A: My favorite aspect of the internship is that everyone at the company is really helpful and wants to help me learn (typical of an education company). My mentor and my co-workers have all been so helpful in helping my internship go smoothly. The best part is I get to see my project from start to finish, and it will be built into Udemy's website. This means I get to own all my work, and it'll look great on my portfolio.
Q: How will your internship help with your career objectives?
A: I feel like this internship will have helped me in a number of ways. I was excited to get some experience working at a startup, so I could understand if the company size and culture is the right fit for me after graduation. Additionally, I think that working as a UX designer has helped me realize that I still love coding and would like to apply my coding knowledge to my design toolbelt. I'm sure a lot of students, like me, are still figuring out what kind of career they want to pursue after graduation, so honestly I'm just happy to have this internship as a chance to explore different career options.
Hiram Munn
Intern at Workday in Pleasanton, California.
Q: What are you working on?
A: Workday builds and manages human resource software for businesses. I work for the HR Recruiting team, working on building out the tools that companies that use Workday can use to manage and facilitate their hiring and recruiting efforts.
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of the internship?
A: My favorite aspect of the internship is that the workplace culture is very welcoming. The full-time employees at Workday are always willing to answer the questions that I have while working on different projects and are all very knowledgeable.
Q: How will your internship help with your career objectives?
A: Workday has provided me a great chance to get experience working on team-based software development while using agile methodologies. We learn about the importance of working on teams throughout our careers at the iSchool, and we learn about agile software development in the Informatics program. Actually carrying them in a real world application can be challenging and very rewarding. It’s great to see things we experience in our courses at the iSchool being carried over into the actual workplace.
Daniel Sebring
Interning as an IT analyist at Cisco in San Jose, California
Q: What are you working on?
A: I'm on the Cloud & Software IT team, as an IT analyst. I've been working on a couple different things. I started off making some presentations about the cloud computing market and the tools Cisco has to start businesses selling their services in the cloud. This was because the presentation will be used with potential clients, and it helped me learn about Cisco's offerings. After that, I started working on an interactive demo/explanation of our ordering system to save time because employees won't have to spend as much time explaining how to make orders. Most recently, I've started documenting some of our big data systems to better see commonalities between different clients and evaluate whether we could make a universal system, thus saving lots of money by eliminating a lot of redundancy. We'll see where that goes!
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of the internship?
A: Here at Cisco, they've recently switched CEOs for the first time in 20 years. New CEO Chuck Robbins replaced John Chambers and put a new leadership team in place, and a lot of them have presented to interns. I've been able to ask questions and get advice from our old CEO, our new CEO, our CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and lots of different high-level vice presidents, and learned some great tips for a young professional just starting his career. Plus, I got to see Christina Aguilera in a private show at Levi's Stadium in San Jose to celebrate the transition!
Q: How will your internship help with your career objectives?
A: My internship has helped me really get a feel for what I'm looking for in a career, and how I want to focus my last year at UW. I've been able to see what a lot of different groups at Cisco are working on, as well as visit some other companies in the Silicon Valley area to get a feel for what the culture is like at different places. I've also been able to use some of my analysis skills and see more about how they apply to real world situations, and how to work with teams and complete projects effectively.
Austin Woehrle
Intern at Starbucks Corp. in Seattle
Q: What are you working on?
A: I am on the enterprise architecture team. It's basically technology systems analysis and determining how to integrate new software into the Starbucks technology environment along with finding ways to maximize efficiency.
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of the internship?
A: Starbucks is actually a really great company; the culture here is amazing and everyone is so kind (especially to interns). Everyone I have met with has been willing to share anything with me and include me on meetings, and introduce me to other people I may want to meet. There have been a ton of events for us like a Sounders game, dinners, a cruise and other events. I've really learned how corporate culture works and learned how much there is to do out in industry.
Q: How will your internship help with your career objectives?
A: The internship will prove to be one of the most important points in my career, I believe. I've really gained an awesome understanding of how the industry works and how complex things can be in the "real world."