My Tech Internship Experience (Part 2)

This is a continuation from part 1 of my tech internship experience. Thanks for reading it up until now.

Did We Make it?

I have to be sincere here. I was frustrated. I felt like giving up and quitting it all but you know what? There is another side to it. I love learning and this was a huge opportunity for me to learn something I didn’t know but I wasn’t expecting to learn too much within a very short period. I wish I could take it slow and steady but every passing day, the deadline for the project drew closer and it felt like we wouldn’t be able to scale through.

I was happy that I was learning every day. Meetings with senior colleagues were opportunities to learn what you didn’t know or learn how to do things better like writing cleaner and shorter codes to perform a given task. I liked that very much but it didn’t change the fact that I was still drowning.

How we sometimes had to work with two screens. Amazing!

Did we make it? Yes, we did but that was probably after six months and a lot happened in-between. Are you shocked? Follow me!

What Did I Do?

Like I said, I was really frustrated and at this point, it was like I needed help. I was losing it and almost losing interest but something happened.

It was time for the Christmas break and because our project timeline (2 months) was almost expired, it was just common sense to still work on the project and possibly learn as much as possible during the break. We were one month into the project already and we were still struggling. In other words, there was literarily no break for us. But let me tell you what I did.

I went for the holiday without touching any form of codes or doing anything related to the project but somewhere in my mind, the project was there. I thought about it every day. I wanted to work on it but I just couldn’t bring myself to do so. I knew something was wrong somewhere. That was when I started reading a lot about mental health and workplace productivity.

It dawned on me that I needed to put my mental health in place before work resumed. I couldn’t believe my mental health was at stake and if I didn’t take care of it or hadn’t noticed it on time, it could have deteriorated into depression.

After all the education on mental health, I was more prepared to resume work and to face the challenge of the project. I also had to give myself some pep talk and I reached out to other developers I knew to understand how they do survive.

This I can tell you for sure. Been here many times.

I resumed work in January better off than I was before I went for the holiday and my productivity also increased.

I started reading again. This time, it was more laser-focused and tuned to what I wanted to do in the project and before I knew it, I integrated the first screen for the project. I was very excited on this day. Nobody taught me how to do it. I was just given the task and with the knowledge gotten from materials like books, online resources and research, I did it.

In the coming days, weeks and months, I had learnt a whole lot. I now understood the workings of the backend codes I was initially lost in and I integrated almost all the screens that were required for the project.

Lessons from The Project

The project taught me practical and technical skills both frontend and backend skills. Writing of codes has also helped to solidify my knowledge as opposed to the first time when all I had to do was just to read books and watch online videos.

I have also learnt to work and collaborate with team members not just physically but remotely. I have learnt how to use Git to collaborate on projects. Collaborating with Git was something I had not done before, even though I had a knowledge of Git before the project started. The project also helped me to increase my knowledge of Git as I had to take online courses on the subject matter too.

My problem-solving skills have also greatly improved. Each day that I had to work on the project, either integrating screens or writing backend codes, has enabled me to solve one problem or the other. Sometimes I get stuck, not knowing what to do, but by reaching out to Google or asking a more experienced colleague, I am able to surmount any challenge faced. And sometimes, through teamwork, my team mates and I are able to put heads together to solve a challenge.

Something similar to some of the things we did

I must confess that I had amazing team mates and a very wonderful team lead. Working with them was really beautiful and if I was to choose team mates to work on this same project again, I would choose them over and over again.

And to the senior colleagues, what can I say? We had a lot of them at our disposal. We wouldn’t have been able to finish in six months without their great help. They are really experienced and knowledgeable and it was only a privilege to have been under their tutelage.

Conclusion

The internship is over now and I can say that I am not the same person I used to be before the internship. I have grown in my tech skills and I am more positioned to take on tech challenges when they come my way. If there is anything I will take away with me, it is this: you can solve any problem just by walking away from it and coming back to it with fresh eyes. That helped me a lot during the course of the internship.

I hope you have learnt a thing or two from my tech internship experience. Feel free to drop questions and comments in the comment section.

Thank you.