Gaining experience through new technologies

I’m here to share my internship experience at AIS to hopefully give a good idea of what to expect if you, too, are considering entering the program. Your experience will likely be a bit different as I started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Once I accepted the position, I was shipped a laptop, and it was off to the races.

By the second day, I had a project assigned: implementing Jupyter Notebooks into Scale. This project helped me become more comfortable with popular tools like Docker, Jupyter, and Python and projects AIS currently works on, such as SEED and Scale. Learning these technologies was very helpful once I started my full-time position.

The second project I was assigned was updating the front end of the Ohio demo site. I had a lot of freedom over the site’s design, and I received some excellent experience in responsive design using Material Design Lite and basic HTML/CSS. Overall I learned a lot and expanded my technology repertoire.

During my internship, the projects I worked on were mostly a solo effort, but I did have help along the way. During my internship, I was assigned a first-week “buddy,” an intern supervisor, and had someone to check in with every week. If I needed help from other people at AIS, that was not an issue either. Everyone was happy to help or pointed me toward someone else who would be more helpful.

The internship structure was intended to be a three-month period, in which I set three goals to complete and used an Azure DevOps board to track these goals. At the end of each month, I would write up a report of what I did that month, what struggles and successes I had, and what I was planning on achieving the next month. At the end of the internship, I was asked to present the Jupyter Notebook Scale integration and write up an internship review. The review was an excellent addition as I gave my thoughts about the experience and got feedback. The experience was great, and for anyone thinking about interning at AIS, I highly recommend it. The team here is sharp and approachable, and the projects are engaging.