Francis Rigor

College: Brooklyn College

Education Level: Senior

Career Interest: Software Engineering/ Information Technology

I am an upcoming senior at Brooklyn College. My goal is to pursue a career in Software Engineering or Information Technology, but I guess I'll start off as a web developer to start my adult life. In my spare time, I like to read a lot on just about whatever I feel like, whether that be history, fiction, or the news. I also like to run outside whenever possible and play video games.

What was your role?

I was originally put on the Mortgage team, where I primarily did front-end stuff. Mostly, I implemented buttons and tried to make clear the overall look and feel of the mortgage features. Then I was transferred to the intern pages team to work on developing a webpage displaying all the interns for this summer, where again, I primarily did front-end work.

What did you work on?

I worked on implementing front end features for the mortgage option and then did tag (or tabs) work for the Interns page

What was the impact of your project?

The intern page will show any future potential interns that interning at Unadat is a great choice in finding an opportunity to develop marketable skills. It will show how many people worked in a particular year and who went where. For anybody who interned at Unadat already, future employers can see that they developed projects that made an impact whether that be in business or personally.

What did you learn or improve on from this internship or from your teammates?

I've learned how programmers work in a professional environment and how to work with other people in getting a project done. I learned how to use Google Cloud Shell as a productivity tool and then deploy those changes to see what I've done in real time as it would appear to an actual user. I honed my knowledge in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in this internship and how they interact together. I learned how to quickly look up any knowledge that I needed such as what HTML tags to use or how to use CSS to make a webpage look cleaner. JavaScript in particular, I got to see how it affects an actual website people use. From my teammates, I learned that everybody has varying levels of skills, but them being chosen for the internship means they at the very least are good at something. The people that I worked with, like me, only learned programming from classes and that was enough for us to figure out what to do, but some of my teammates learned faster than me and they shared their knowledge with the rest of us.

What skills have you gained?

I`ve learned how programmers work in a professional environment and how to work with other people in getting a project done. I learned how to use Google Cloud Shell as a productivity tool and then deploy those changes to see what I`ve done in real time as it would appear to an actual user.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock I've had to overcome was getting used to working in a professional environment. I've been in an academic mindset my entire life, where you have a teacher telling you what to do and then getting graded for that work. This environment is nothing like that.While you are told what to do, you are completely on your own after that and are expected to have something done each day. Debugging a feature that doesn't work the way you want it to was by far the most challenging part of the internship. I knew coming in that it was an inevitable part of programming, but whereas debugging for me was easy because of programs that I originally had to write, debugging in this internship was made challenging because of understanding code that I originally did not write. I learned to overcome this experience by playing around with the code in real time to understand what was going on and thus learned also how to navigate my way around a large codebase.

How has company culture guided your work?

It was a relaxed environment that allowed me to go at my own pace. It allowed me to be very experimental in how I approach things and was free to do whatever I wanted. It allowed me to work in a way that I was able to be most productive. I thus learned how being a professional programmer works in a relaxed way.

What was your experience at Unadat?

It was better than I expected. I was nervous because on top of being my first internship, I thought I was expected to be good at programming, which I thought my current level wasn't good enough for an internship. But on the first day, I was relieved to learn that I didn't have to know much at all and that I was here to learn. That made me comfortable knowing that I was under no pressure and could learn at my own pace.

What was one big project you worked on during the internship? Can you walk me through the process?

The big project that I worked on was the interns page. I was taken out from the mortgage team and given the task of implementing features that I could gladly call my own. That feature was adding tags to people so that any future interns can see who interned, what year they interned, and what school they came from. For example, someone might have interned in 2021 and studied at Brooklyn College. I first put up some tabs to see if they would work and then I copied and pasted the intern info that was already made into those tabs. Once that was done, I then created dropdown menus to simplify the number of tabs that appeared on screen.

What advice would you give to future interns?

You don't have to be really skilled at what you do to succeed and get something out of an internship, but it does help to have a basic understanding of the role that you are going to do so that you can understand what you need to do to. Also, don't ever be afraid to speak up and ask for help when needed.