Summer Internship Series: Week 5

Developing My Skills

Joe Call

In my five weeks at MRI Software, I have learned completely new skills and thrown out some that I thought of as developed. While the first has tested my ability to learn and understand, the second tested my ability to ignore my ego and accept that my confidence may be overconfidence. I came to work at MRI Software expecting that learning new things to be the most important thing I would do but now I know that replacing what you may consider polished skills has a much larger effect and is much harder.

The biggest challenge for me from purely technical perspective was adapting to the Microsoft development ecosystem. Using C# to develop ASP.NET applications in Visual Studio was a big change for me, coming from Python/Django and Ruby on Rails. While working with C# and ASP.NET has not been perfect or exactly what I was expecting, overall it has been pretty smooth and is clearly a very polished system. It’s been a great thing for me to learn and, through contrast, has taught me things about those alternatives I’ve used in the past.

When I started this internship I expected and hoped that I would both learn new things and improve upon what I already knew. I did not expect to find that any of my knowledge was completely wrong and needed to be thrown away. Project design is probably one of the most nebulous and swiftly changing skills a programmer can have. A good project architecture will be completely different for different projects and if you get it exactly right the first time, it will go completely unnoticed. If you mess it up, however, you’ll never hear the end of it. The most deceptive thought about project design that I had is that it is just an opinion. You can complete the same project with two radically different internal designs with little difference in performance or user-facing appearance. I thought this meant that good project design couldn’t be objectively measured. What I’ve learned is that good project design can’t be measured objectively but it will be worked on by other developers and my opinion is one of many. Coming to a consensus about the design of the project ensures consistency and usability for other developers. It was easy for me to forget that a dozen other people will probably end up working on what I was writing and wouldn’t have the benefit of my thoughts to help them out so making the code follow a predictable pattern was extremely important.

Justin Van Koot

This will now be the 5^th week that I have been a part of the 2016 MRI internship. With that I can say that have potentially learned more about writing software than in a whole semester of classes. With the help of some of the more senior developers, I have been able to more-so develop what I really specifically enjoy about the projects. What I am referring to would be languages I enjoy to write in and stages of the development I prefer. I have also seen what parts of projects I do not enjoy working on but are aspects I need to improve on. I have also seen how certain standards that have been brought up in my classes seem to be different within actual production standards. Learning these standards along with what exactly is expected for a developer is, in my opinion, accelerating my progress in my education and really helping me gain experience for what is needed in the real world.

Most of the development that I have done has been with helping others and looking at what someone else has written and being able to tell what it is doing faster and to quickly understand any problems the writer may have with the code. I know this was something that my school specifically always mentions, wishing that all students could go through and examine everyone else’s code. I am happy that I have been given the opportunity to do this and happy in general that I have the opportunity to do this at MRI Software.

Emily Mracek

Being an intern has allowed me to develop many skills.  Many of the projects I am assigned to help me better my ability to problem solve and be more independent.  Maybe you are given a task with no step by step instruction, or maybe something in an excel sheet isn’t quite adding up to be the way you had originally thought.  These are a few of the scenarios that allow you get your hands dirty and see if you can fix the problem yourself before asking for help.

Another skill I have been making progress on is my work ethic.  As an intern, you have to be able to plan out your day and prioritize which tasks you should be completing first, how your time should be spent, and the amount of time allotted to each particular thing.    In order to help myself develop this skill, I start off my day by writing down each thing I need to have complete and other various projects I need to continue to work on.  This helps me stay on task and visualize how much time I will have for assignment.  I also have a monthly calendar that I use to keep track of all of the monthly/weekly/daily tasks I have assigned to me.

Staying organized not only helps me with my work ethic, but it also helps me be more self-disciplined.  I am able to complete tasks and projects by their deadlines without any constant reminders from my co-workers and manager.  Since I have a list of what needs done each day, I am able to focus on those particular things and not procrastinate or forget to do them.

Lastly, being an intern has not only helped me develop work skills, but communication skills as well.  I have learned the proper etiquette to use when speaking with another colleague, manager, and even a prospective client or current customer.  Being able to develop these communication skills will enable me to interact with others in a more professional way.

Jason Stafford

Law has two worlds: law in school and law in practice. And these can be vastly different worlds. Law school is about preparation for exams, testing your ability to recall and analyze the law in random, often impossible scenarios to develop answers to thought out problems. Law school tests your ability to push yourself day after day with hundreds of pages of reading a night, massive writing assignments one after the other, and whole grade based exam on that material. Law school tests your ability to handle high levels of stress both in the classroom and outside. Law school teaches you about the wording of the law, how it applies, and how it has applied to cases in the past. You are learning about the history of the law in order to apply it to real world situations. In essence, you are learning what is required to pass law school exams.

Developing skills in the workplace is completely different than in school. For example, in law school a Contracts class is about learning the forms of contracts, the laws on contracts, and the requirements needed to form a contract. While in the workplace this information is helpful, but at work it is about using the contracts to analyze data and requests that clients may have. You have to analyze the contract and how it applies to certain situations. You are rarely analyzing the law of the contract like you would in class. On top of this, legal writing assignments in school are done from scratch and take weeks to complete. In the workplace you are often given a template and then a few hours to do the same assignment. This is challenging but not having to start from scratch makes a serious difference.

All in all, MRI has developed my skills immensely in terms of the working world. I have been able to enhance my writing skills in a faster paced setting and learn quicker how to analyze documents and how they apply to the real world. It is a lot less book learning and a lot more real world learning. I have enjoyed school, but developing skills in the workplace is essential to being a successful lawyer and employee. MRI has consistently helped develop those skills to make me a better employee and future lawyer.

Quinn McHale

One thing is sure, my internship here at MRI Software has allowed me to develop my skills tremendously. The most obvious way I’ve done this is through my technical ability, which has increased by leaps and bounds. As a software engineer intern, I absolutely learn something new every day. Being surrounded by intelligent, motivated individuals inspires me to dig deeper and really understand the coding process. For instance, every week I get the opportunity to look at my coworkers’ code and share my own. This process is phenomenal in helping me cultivate better coding skills. Writing code that works is one thing, but being able to explain it eloquently not only helps your team but also helps you understand your own code. Also, being able to receive programming advice from software professionals is such an invaluable resource.

In addition to my improving technical skills, my internship has also improved my professional skills. Whether it’s professional communication with my boss or professional time management skills, I’m learning what it means to be an employee. These types of skills can help me succeed no matter what profession I end up in. It’s also something that can’t be taught in school. You may have great technical ability, but being able to connect that ability to a workplace environment is another skill all together. I’ve realized the innate value an internship provides and how eye-opening your first real-world work experience can be. I will continue to learn every day while I enjoy the rest of my internship as an #MRIntern.