July 6, 2022
The group of interns has completed the first half of the internship program! In this time they showcased curiosity and strived to learn about the company and contribute through group and individual efforts. Group workshops equipped the students with the necessary skills to explore their interests and improve work procedures and environment, because this group is not about busy work. This week is focused on some of the takeaways from the program.
Automation
“Software is the language of automation.”
– Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
Throughout the program interns have been learning about the importance of work automation and have been actively incorporating that in the individual work, so this week’s workshop was a great real life example. Director of Information Technology and Infrastructure, Brian Roy, lead a session focusing on regular expressions. They are typically a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Specifically for ISoft team they came in handy when processing the data import for a new customer.
Collaboration
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Former jurist and legal scholar
In the past month Izak has been working on improving the existing system for handling employee lunch orders that come in daily, which would have a great impact on the work that Hope Anderson, Office Assistant, does for the entire company – making sure no one is left hungry. He created a database of vendors with the location, group order option, average price, and ease of access rating. An addition to the new tool is a Discord bot that will send out a reminder for group orders, so the task doesn’t have to be done manually. Throughout the project, interns acted as the project managers, taking the feature requests directly from the customer. More importantly they have learned about the significance of feedback and collaboration. They have been closely working with the professional software development staff and exploring best practices and working through the blockers.
Fun
“At the end of the day, if I can say I had fun, it was a good day.”
– Simone Biles, artistic gymnast
It is salient to the ISoft team that the interns learn to not only work hard, but also have fun along the process! Some of the fun activities that the group has gotten involved in is Coffee Club, puzzles, and games. Every Friday they enjoy a free cup of freshly brewed coffee and a conversation with the coworkers before the work day. For a quick break they have been working on a jigsaw puzzle and this week first thousand pieces came together. At the end of the day on Friday, they play a game of choosing.
