Liza Feng

College: Hunter College

Education Level: Junior

Career Interest: Web Developer

Hello there! My name is Liza and I was an intern for Unadat during the summer of 2022. I like thinking about the way users utilize certain products and how to organize the website's tabs or buttons. I originally wanted to become a nurse because I did not know exactly what to do after high school. After getting into Hunter, I realized that nothing in nursing interested me and that I might become quickly burnt out from it. I enjoyed my high school engineering class so I thought I would become a product designer to create products that serve multiple functions. During the process of trying to transfer to a different school, I took a programming class for a requirement. That was where I learned that programming is similar to what I enjoyed in high school, using what I have to create a product. So I decided to be a computer science major. Now my goal is to become a full stack developer and then learn ios development to launch my own app one day. I dont know what the app would do right now but thats ok, I'll figure it out as I go.

What was your role?

I started with designing the survey portion of the Unadat financial wellness score feature. It was originally designed to gather information from users as well as using the existing data to gather information to provide a score. Towards the end of the internship, it evolved to become a wizard that lead customers through the different parts of the website to fill out certain information required for a wellness score.

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

I cant really say the impact that the project had on the company itself since the feature did not launch yet and there does not exist data to give an update for what was improved before the project was launched.

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

I learned how to give credit where its due as well as how to point concerns out for the progress and well being of the team. I learned that if you do not voice certain concerns, it would affect the team in the future and the issue would be brought up sooner or later. It also gave me good practice with how to work with different personalities as well as noticing different strengths and weaknesses. I realized what my weaknesses and strengths were as well as how to get help from other people that would make up for my weakness (vice versa).

What skills have you gained?

I picked up on website design skills and got better at using the paint application on my laptop to help design the website diagrams. I learned how to

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock that I had to overcome would be when we were transitioning from a survey to an automated feature. There were some things that I did not fully understand such as how we would partition the information inputted into different months for the current year. I overcame this roadblock by setting up with my supervisor to discuss my concerns and questions. I then set up a meeting with my team to discuss what I understood from the meeting and combine ideas with my team so that we could be on the same page.

How has company culture guided your work?

One of them was to not have a whole polished work while coming up with the ideas or when presenting. Allowing us to present in whichever way was the easiest to get our idea across, whether it would be a google doc or a rough sketch. It helped us focus on the idea itself and not on the aesthetics of a power point. It helped prevented a lot of the roadblocks that would have occurred from trying to perfect an idea. Another company culture that helped me a lot during this internship was to use what is already around you, especially from a big company. Chances are, they placed a lot of resources already to research ideas and if we could use it without using much of our resources then go that route. I think the idea of being good at borrowing and combining borrowed ideas into one helped a lot too.

What was your experience at Unadat?

I liked that the internship did not have someone over my shoulder constantly and allowing us room to breathe. It was nice to be able to work with mostly people that were also interns because everyone is on the same boat and it was a lot easier to talk to each other. The weekly sprints and check ins were useful as they made sure that we had a goal to work on every week. Having jira board was useful to help us organize our project into small bitesize pieces and the story points helped a lot to figure out an estimate for the difficulty of the tasks.

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

The main project that we worked on during the internship was the wellness score. We first started out with seeing that other financial websites used which was a survey. After a few meetings with the supervisor, it was decided that the survey would be tedious for the users to have to enter in each answer to the question. We grew the idea into a wizard that would bring them to the other parts of the website like the account settings. It took a lot of sketches and consulting with the quants people to see if we were asking the users for the right information.

What advice would you give to future interns?

I think for the first day, have a meeting among the team to talk about the skills that each of you have and make a small table of it so that you can keep track. Then ask each person how they feel about the role that they were assigned to and see if someone wants to switch roles. Then having the default project manager talk to the supervisor about the role changes. Make sure to also communicate with each other and be comfortable with asking questions as well as making sure you paraphrase the response so that there are little to no misunderstandings.