Computer Science Major Growing Her Professional Network and Skills During Internship With Audible

A summer internship at Audible has opened many doors for Aditi Joshi '19 (computer science, mathematics). As a software development engineer intern, she's growing her network and her skills.

Aditi Joshi '19, Audible

Majors:

Computer science, mathematics.

Internship title:

Software development engineer intern.

How I got this internship:

I got this internship through the Grace Hopper Conference.

What I do, day to day:

This summer, I interned at Consumption Team, a tech team of Audible in Newark, New Jersey. Consumption Team owns various tools, frameworks and services that allow other development teams in the organization to build and ship software. Software development engineer interns work on an independent project throughout the 12 week-long program prepared and designed by assigned mentors. These projects are chosen in a way that allows interns to make a direct contribution to the end product, thus giving them a sense of accomplishment. I spend most of my day researching and implementing different aspects of the project assigned to me. Other than that, I actively participate in different team meeting including daily standup, sprint planning and other scrum meetings. Having said that, as an intern I was able to get full software development engineer experience.

Other internships:

I have worked part-time as an intern at ReturnLogic, NYMM and InfoDevelopers as a software engineer intern, web developer intern, and android developer intern respectively. However, this is my first full-time internship so I had an opportunity to explore and experience different aspects of software engineering. Hence, this has been a wonderful experience for me. So in the future, I do see myself getting a full-time job as a software developer engineer in a tech company.

Most valuable part of this experience:

Audible is a growing company but has a startup feel and is owned by one of the leading tech companies, Amazon. Audible employees have all the resources and opportunities that are accessible to Amazon employees. At the same time, we know most of the people working in the company by first-name basis and we also get to meet our CEO everyday! Hence, Audible has a very different working environment. With this working culture, I was able to experience the best of both worlds: a startup and a large company. As a part of Amazon company, we share a lot of internal resources including internal wiki, internal search engine, internal Q&A site, internal codebase and internal video streaming with thousands of engineers in the world. These resources have been a very useful part of this internship as they helped me to be work more independently. Similarly, it has helped me to develop skills to easily adapt to new programming language and tools.

Advice for students considering internships:

You should take advantage of professional development opportunities provided by the internship as it is going to be very different than what you do and study in college. The skills you will obtain here are going to be really helpful in the future so don’t be scared of making any mistakes as you will learn a lot from them. Also, don’t ever fear to ask questions to people around you as they are really helpful and don’t expect you to know everything.

How this internship has helped me:

Going into the internship in Audible, I knew that scope of computer science is really huge and unexpected. Even though, tech is growing exponentially, there is always more room for the growth. Having said that, you should not always focus on learning a programming language or learning how to use certain tools. Rather you should prepare yourself to deal with unexpected problems and adapt to new programming language or framework easily. In this internship, I have used tools and frameworks that I have never used before. This helped me to develop my skill to adapt to new languages and tools more easily. Similarly, it also helped me boost my confidence to handle similar situations in the future. Also, I am very grateful to have the opportunity to work with a talented group of people, to further develop my software engineering skills and learn about the work culture in tech. This experience is going to be really helpful in preparing for my life after Dickinson.

Post-Dickinson plans:

After I graduate from Dickinson, I hope to work as a software development engineer in a tech firm for few years and get more hands-on experience in the field of computer science. While I am not quite sure about what I want to focus on for my graduate studies, I want to explore my interests and eventually go to graduate school for a master’s in computer science.

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Published August 10, 2018