Julian Poli

College: LaGuardia Community College

Education Level: Associate's Degree

Career Interest: Civil Engineering / Transportation Engineering

Julian Poli was born and raised in Forest Hills, New York. He is currently pursuing an associate’s degree in civil engineering at LaGuardia Community College. Julian always had an interest in math and science, participating in various youth programs such as the Software Engineering Program (SEP), Maker Faire, and Mouse Squad. However, after graduating high school, Julian was uncertain if college was the right choice for him. After taking a gap year to save money, Julian decided to enroll into LaGuardia Community College, promising himself that he would put 110% of his effort into succeeding. He soon came to realize that college was the right thing for him because of the environment and friends he has met along the way. Julian hopes to one day work for the Department of Transportation in hopes to create high-speed rail networks in the United States.

What was your role?

As a Unadat intern, I worked on the Money Coaches team. The main goal for our team was to create a system on the Unadat website to ’streamline’ financial advice. This means that users on the website can conveniently connect with financial advisors to create goals and receive financial advice. In my specific role as a UI.UX intern, I created wireframes and created the foundation for each page. I also collaborated with the Computer Science team to make sure that their code matched my vision.

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

The impact of our project is to make it easy for people to get convenient financial advice and goal planning through the Unadat website. From a business perspective, this will bring Unadat a stream of income from these services, and will provide a job opportunity to individuals who are looking for an entry level job in financial advising. From a user perspective, there are not many companies that provide affordable, convenient financial advising, so Unadat can fulfill this need.

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

The main thing that I have learned from my teammates was giving feedback. Their feedback on my wireframes helped me learn and understand different ideas and potential design flaws. Without my teammates feedback, my wireframes wouldn’t be as good as they were.

What skills have you gained?

The main skill that I picked up from working at this internship was my speaking/communication skills. Personally, I am not the best when it comes to public speaking because I get very nervous. However, in this internship, there are presentation days every Thursday and the CEO is very `hands on` with his work, so he expects you to meet with him frequently and explain your ideas. There are many opportunities to hone your public speaking abilities.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock that I faced was my asynchronous schedule. I had many things to do during the summer besides working (i.e summer classes), so managing my time was a huge roadblock that I had to overcome. Since I wasn’t present for the majority of the meetings, I had to take the initiative to contact my coworkers and to do my work without as much support as the other members in my team. However, through effective communication and teamwork, this obstacle was easy to overcome; without my team, I wouldn’t have been able to overcome this.

How has company culture guided your work?

One thing that Unadat does within its culture is to disregard how many hours you work. Instead, tasks are assigned to you with a ’story point’ value. For an individual task, the more story points it has, more time and effort is needed to complete it. This helped me tremendously because some tasks won’t take you a long time. At Unadat, they care about the quality of your work, not how much time you work.

What was your experience at Unadat?

My experience working at Unadat was very positive. This is the first time that I have every worked virtually. Although I was a little apprehensive at the beginning because of this being virtual, the team I was assigned to was very helpful. I learned how to use platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Jira, which are two popular platforms that many companies use. Throughout my experience in this internship, there have been many times where I had to resolve design flaws and collaborate with the other UI/UX intern to create a ’polished’ wireframe to push to the computer science team. Lastly, I have connected with many smart, like-minded individuals that I plan to keep in touch with in the future.

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

One big project that I worked on during the internship was to brainstorm the Money Coach feature in the beginning. My first step was to create a flow chart showing all the different ideas and things the website would need. The second step was to create many different steps the team needs to finish to reach the end goal, which is to create the money Coach feature. For example, the first step that I noticed was that we needed to create the application page to be able to hire financial advisors to the website. The second step would be to construct and code the dashboard for this feature.

What advice would you give to future interns?

My advice to the next cohort of interns is to make the most of your time. This internship gives you the independence and opportunity to ’stand out’ from the rest of the interns. Sean is a very ’hands-on’ CEO and it can work in your favor or against your favor. As long as you work hard and are passionate in what you’re doing, then you’ll do great!