Introduction to Work
The past few weeks here at The Leahy Center have been pretty eventful, even if we’ve only just begun our real work. As an intern for the programming team, I’ve been working on the beginnings of a new ticket system. This system will, theoretically, be an easier way for employees to get in contact with the help desk about any issues that may come up, as well as make it easier for the help desk to manage issues. Though it’s still very much in the planning phase, things have been coming along nicely.
Over my short time here, I’ve gotten the chance to step outside my comfort zone and jump headfirst into new technologies and methods of development. I’ve had to, rather quickly, learn to use the frameworks and tools we’ve planned for our work, namely Angular, a popular web framework, and MongoDB, an NoSQL database. It’s been a very informative experience. I’ve had to learn to pick up new concepts, languages, and tools I was unfamiliar with. I’m also learning to read documentation (and google things, of course) much more effectively.
Successes
I’m especially proud of how quickly I’ve picked up Angular. I, along with other members of the team, briefly worked on a practice program to get used to the new technology—a program that could be used to track development changes, similar to Trello or GitHub. I put in a lot of work on the Angular side of things and ended up producing a basic setup for it that I’m quite happy with. It’s been a really eye-opening experience for how I should go about tackling learning new development tools and something I think I’ll use in my professional life a lot.
Takeaways
Overall, I’d say my time at The Leahy Center has been a positive experience. Sure it makes balancing work and college a bit more difficult, but I think it provides me with a great opportunity to learn some skills that classes don’t teach.
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Written by Collin Westgate ‘22 // Computer Science & Innovation