By Mark Rutto and Audu Charity
You have made the tension to advance your technical skills and learn to code and you are asking yourself, “Where do I start? You-tube tutorials? Online classes? An internship?”. All these questions will determine your future career path if you seek the best answers to them and make a wise decision. We are living in an era of content overload, it’s hard to find the rightful resources that will get you started in software engineering.
“Seeing is believing, doing is knowing.” – Neil Beyersdorf.
Our best advice to you would be “An Internship”. Yes you got us right, as a Software Engineer this is the best way to get your career path started. Ask us why!
These past five weeks we have been Software Engineering Interns on the team at Wizewerx and will be for the next 7 weeks.
When we joined, we was inspired by the opportunity to collaborate and learn from a global team with seasoned experiences and expertise. Along with that, we would receive the opportunity to witness the inner-workings of a company first hand, and put the coding skills we learned to the test.
In this post we will share about the internship scholarship, our own experience as interns, and our recommendations for what makes a successful engineering internship program.
For an engineering internship to be successful, we recommend that the program should be based around some of these goals:
1. Study, Learn, Research.
The bulk of your evaluation will be based on your technical skills and how much work you are able to accomplish during your internship.
Becoming comfortable with your development tools is a great way to increase your productivity.
Investing your time in learning your IDE’s keyboard shortcuts and customizing your terminal settings may not seem immediately important, but in the long-run,these will greatly increase your development speed.
So, it’s important that you set yourself up to be able to finish your assigned work and produce quality code.
2. Ask Questions.
Mike, our CEO/founder told us that “there are no stupid questions,”
and that we are encouraged to ask whatever comes to mind or what we are not clear about.
We, on the other hand, firmly believe there is such thing as a stupid question.
Usually those occur when you just haven’t been paying attention, or when you’re too lazy to think for yourself about what has been said.
Asking questions is important, particularly when you genuinely don’t understand something. But listening to answers is even more so.
Take the time to listen to what is being said, and think about it.
It’s human nature to hear the words coming out of someone else’s mouth, and start mentally preparing a response while they’re talking.
Don’t do it. Pay attention to what you’re being taught/told.
3. Be humble.
Because there are so many ways to skin a cat in the dev world, it’s easy to get caught up in a particular way of doing things, and assume that your way is better than everyone else’s way.
Don’t get us wrong — there are best practices, and there are, no doubt, good rules that each company follows in order to ensure code consistency.
But don’t dismiss what others have done just because it doesn’t conform to what you’re used to. It may (or may not) be even better than your code.
4. Be Open to Learn New things/tools.
That’s the essence of the internship, yes?
Learning new things is self-work. It sucks. Especially when you’re quite comfortable with what you already know.
But, committing to being a lifelong learner can do so much for us. It helps us learn more about ourselves and,
in turn, helps us become better versions of who we are in our communities and world.
5. Lastly, Have fun.
Try to enjoy yourself during the internship.
But if what you’re working on is tedious and mundane? try to make a game out of it!
If you’re unhappy as an intern, chances are, you’ll be unhappy as a full-time employee.
And no one wants that.
Conclusion.
Big shout out goes to Co-Founder Mike Sutton and our Practice Leads Thiru Njuguna and Idrees Jawadwala for their mentor-ship and knowledge so far.
We never imagined learning so much, in different areas of tech,(Engineering,Design, Business, planning, marketing, technical writing, the list goes on.) in such a short period of time
— or having so much fun doing it.
Thank you guys.