By: Valerie Kristofic
Follow Valerie on a typical week in the life of a Summer Associate as a member of the software engineering team.
This is actually my third summer as an intern at UPMC Enterprises! As a repeat intern and someone who has really enjoyed my time here, I’ve been asked to shed some light on what a typical week looks like as a software engineer. Although the weeks vary greatly, I’ve tried my best to highlight what has kept me coming back.
Each week I have the opportunity to participate fully in all of the meetings required by full-time developers. These meetings range from daily stand-ups to our team’s bi-weekly Technical Development Reviews (we call them FRED meetings- Friendly Review of Experimental Design).
In between meetings, we tackle our main task, which is general maintenance on and the creation of new features for one of the many projects happening behind the scenes. Some of the work we’ve been given has required all of the interns to collaborate for both the implementation stage and “swarming” to complete a project on time. We have also gained experience in writing tests for multiple levels of granularity and gained insight on some aspects of the QA process in development. Our team has plenty of help when we need it, including access to a full-time developer as a mentor who can help us find things in the codebase and when we have general environment and procedural questions. Our mentor has been a big help and everyone on the core team is very open to questions and great about offering insight as we go about our work.
Beyond the day-to-day responsibilities, I’ve also been able to enjoy a few events with the entire team of summer interns. This included a trip to the Heinz History Center, group lunch outings, Q&A sessions to discuss the different aspects of the company, good testing practices, and management strategies. It was also an exceptional opportunity to sit down with executives Tal Heppenstall and Adam Berger to learn about their careers and what brought them to UPMC.
Even as I finish my third summer, I’ve learned a lot from all those who I’ve worked with – from the managers, to scrum masters, to developers, and my fellow interns. Everyone at UPMC Enterprises is very intelligent, kind, hard-working, and easy going, so it’s a great environment in which to learn and ask questions. I look forward to the rest of my summer here and continuing to maintain the connections I’ve made.
