Mohammed Uddin

College: CUNY Hunter College

Education Level: Senior

Career Interest: Software Development

My name is Mohammed Uddin. I am entering my senior year as a student at Hunter College. I am majoring in both Computer Science and Statistics. I enjoy reading books and gaming. I plan on working as a Software Developer in the future. I am interested in both web development and machine learning. I find learning different programming languages very fun. My favorite programming languages are Python and C++. I also enjoy learning foreign languages, and right now I am learning Japanese. Programming started off as a hobby for me, but it quickly became something a wanted to pursue as a career path. I am grateful for this internship at Unadat that allowed me to gain practical experience for the future.

What was your role?

I worked on developing webpages for the Money Coaches feature of Unadat. In particular, I worked on the profile page, the services page, and parts of the dashboard page.

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

Our project would add the money coach feature to Unadat. This will allow users to buy financial help services from money coaches. Should users use these services, they should be able to improve their financial health. The project is yet to be completed, however.

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

My teammates helped me reinforce knowledge I learnt over the course of the internship. For the most part, I worked with the other computer science interns, so we helped each other learn PhP and other tools we would have to work with. Without teammates to discuss with, it would have taken me a lot longer to learn the necessary tools and tech for the internship.

What skills have you gained?

I have picked up many new skills. The most practical of these skills are the new languages and libraries I`ve picked up. I now know PhP, which I used to think was very difficult. jQuery used to seem complicated, but now I can work with it confidently. While I knew Bootstrap before, it wasn`t something I was confident in working with, but now I won`t have any problems with it. Other skills I have picked up include learning to work with and communicate with people who have a different knowledge pool than I have.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock I`ve overcome is my lack of experience regarding working with the frontend of a webpage. I used to work exclusively with the backend of webpages, with minimal frontend experience. In this internship, however, we spent most of the first few weeks working on exclusively the frontend of the website, and I gained a lot more confidence in that regard. I thought I would be limited to backend development in the past, but now I think I can aim for a career path in becoming a full stack developer.

How has company culture guided your work?

The company`s respect for privacy has definitely influenced my work. Privacy was something to take into account when working on the database for the website. We had to make decisions on what to store and what not to store.

What was your experience at Unadat?

Working at Unadat as an intern gave me lots of practical experience. Before entering this internship, I did not know PhP and jQuery very well, and I wasn`t very confident in my Bootstrap knowledge. I quickly learned these languages/libraries and am now very confident in working with them. I also gained lots of experience in working with people that are not from a computer science background. Having to communicate in a way that others would understand with limited CS knowledge was a difficult, but rewarding, experience.

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

The biggest project I worked on was probably the services page. I started work on it solo at first, and it was very interesting. I tried to replicate the design the UX team gave, and producing a similar webpage greatly increased my confidence with Bootstrap and frontend development in general. Connecting the page to the database later was nice.

What advice would you give to future interns?

My advice to future interns would be to not doubt themselves. There`s plenty of time to learn while working, and PhP turned out to be very simple. I would recommend just spending a day just looking at documentation and equating it to what you`re familiar with.