Many of our student workers were able to spend this summer participating in various internships outside of the Hunt Institute. Students often return from these experiences with a fantastic arsenal of newly acquired skills, ideas, and perspectives. This summer, the Undergraduate Web Developer in the Institute, Sofia Murillo, had an internship at AT&T, and she shared the following about her experience:
“Sofia, if you had the chance to intern at AT&T again, would you change anything?” asked an AT&T Senior Executive during my intern synopsis presentation. At that moment, I took a few seconds to truly reflect on my summer internship at AT&T.
Over the course of my 10-week long internship, I helped with the recreation of the Compliance Data Management System (CDMS) used by thousands of EH&S (Environmental, Health, & Safety) employees through the creation of four user stories. User stories are documents that give IT/developers an idea of what the person/organization needs from a system being developed. In other words, it’s the instruction manual for developers but from the perspective of the user. The four user stories that I created had over 15,000 words and 100 pages combined. Completing these user stories was no easy feat. Coming into my internship, I knew nothing about EH&S which put me in a position where I had to be resourceful and network around the department to learn more about both CDMS and EH&S as a whole. At the end of my internship, I learned that the time and effort I put into creating the user stories would help AT&T save over a million dollars in time and resources annually.
Even though I kept myself busy with the creation of the user stories, I still sought some programming experience before the end of my internship. After some more networking around the company, I was notified of a project that would provide me that experience. My mini side-project involved using ReactNative and APIs to code a live project filter within a project tracking system used by a different department. Essentially, I helped streamline the search process within the system and I learned how to code using ReactNative (something I’ve always wanted to learn, especially as a Computer Science major and tech lover).
Beyond the projects I worked on, I also led the Intern Newsletter Team made up of 21 interns for three out of the four editions we published, as well as the Interviewing Team throughout the completion of the four editions. I also created and administered the main channel of communication for 176 interns.
Overall, the knowledge and experience that I took away from my internship at AT&T as well as the people I met along the way were absolutely invaluable.
So no, I would not have changed anything about my internship at AT&T, perhaps, at the most, I would have told myself to take a deep breath and trust the process.
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