Leon Belegu

College:

Education Level:

Career Interest:

What was your role?

For the first half of my internship here at Unadat I worked on the `Make a Donation` Pop-up. Initially, this pop-up didn`t have any true bugs however it was giving people a lot of confusion on how it worked and so I decided to re-design the interface. This included adding a default value to the drop-down menu, changing the colors, adding required markers to the required fields, changing the sizes of the boxes, adjusting the functionality of the story specific donation buttons, and much more. The other half of the internship I worked on the financial wellness score interface and adding it to the dashboard/homepage. First, I started off by adding the cell onto the page and designing the general template. Later, I was tasked to adjust the design of the cell based on whether the user has financial wellness score or not. This consisted of creating a function that checks the users score and displays the appropriate cell. Building the cell consisted of adding text, making a button, and general styling changes.

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

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

Working with Ali, I learned the importance of regularly meeting with your teammates on the same ticket as you - he always made sure to meet at least twice a day within our subgroup. Additionally, working with Dai was a great experience and he taught me a lot about how to push, pull, and commit code using bash along with some styling tricks when it came to designing the financial wellness score cells.

What skills have you gained?

Through my internship as a Product Manager and Software Engineer, I gained valuable skills that I`m excited to build upon. I improved User Experience (UX) and Interface (UI) designs, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for front-end development. Additionally, I got into teamwork methods, improved how I work with others, and figured out how to plan products better by understanding what`s appealing to users. Also, I got better at fixing problems and mistakes in code that came from adding new implementations. Overall, these skills will help me make user-friendly designs, write code, analyze data, and manage projects in software and product work.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

Personally, the biggest roadblock I`ve had to overcome was organizing my own personal work during the internship. I found it difficult at times to guide my team while also completing my ticket for the week. However, over the course of the internship I was able to get better at managing myself by delegating more responsibility to the person assigned as point of contact for the ticket. This helped me by only having to reach out to a handful of people as opposed to my whole team. Additionally, when I ran into any difficulties with my tickets I made it a point to attempt to solve it myself and if I was stuck for a while I would reach out to my team and Dan for help.

How has company culture guided your work?

The company culture has allowed for me to grow as both a manager and software engineer by enforcing communication and a positive work environment. It was comforting knowing that if I ever ran into any issues I had my team, Dan, and Sean to rely on and help me through my roadblocks.

What was your experience at Unadat?

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

What advice would you give to future interns?

My advice to the next interns would be to prioritize getting to know their team. Having those personal relationships is not only good for future connections, but it helps the team dynamic a lot and makes the internship a more fruitful experience for everyone involved.