By: Ian Spryn
Follow Summer Associate Ian Spryn during a typical week in the life of a software engineer summer associate working on MyUPMC.
I’m software engineering summer intern at UPMC Enterprises. At this point you’ve already heard from a few others, but I’ve also been asked to share what a typical week looks like. I’ll spare you too much background and instead, echo others by saying there isn’t really a typical week, and that’s what has made this summer so great. That said, I’ve done my best to share some highlights below!
At the start of my internship I was told that the interns will have as much involvement with the team as possible and that we should interact at the same level as everyone else. This meant being given tasks that we could expect would be included into a project’s release. That really set the tone for my experience knowing that what I was doing would make a real impact.
Instead of jumping right into our eventual internship project, we joined the iOS team working on developing the MyUPMC app. The project was already in motion, so our job was to help add functionality into the app. It was a great opportunity and a challenge that required me to learn the Swift programming language used by the iOS team and help them add new features into MyUPMC’s app.
After completing our work with the iOS team it was time to tackle my internship project. For this, I teamed up with fellow intern Emily Wasylenko to create an Alexa Skill for a specific user task.
We worked closely with several others to understand what tools were available and what processes and services we might need to tap into to complete our project. After that, it was up to us to learn, create, and apply. We were put in charge of the entire project, from setting up the backend services, to how the Alexa Skill would talk and interact with the user. As we came to a close with the project and applied the finishing touches, it is profoundly gratifying to see everything interlink perfectly and working as expected.
Being an intern at UPMC Enterprises provided me with a very well-rounded, comprehensive experience. I have been exposed to so many new tools, such as basic AI training, Kubernetes application deployment, SpringBoot, AWS Lambda, creating an API, and more. And on top of that, I was able to work with a fantastic team that if at any point I had questions, I knew I could get answers.
In addition to the many skills I’m taking with away with me, the greatest asset I now have is greater confidence when stepping into entirely new territory thanks to what UPMC Enterprises has taught me.
