Into the Life of a Girl Who Codes

My Summer Internship

This past Summer, I was privileged enough to intern at Fidelity Investments as a Technical Intern. Although my internship took me all the way across the country to North Carolina, I enjoyed the experience and am excited to be returning there for a full time roll as LEAP Associate on the Software Engineering Track. Honestly, I owe my attending Western for this opportunity. Had I not stepped out of my comfort zone to attend a University out of state, but I also would never have agreed to travel across the country for a summer internship. I also would never have traveled halfway across the country to attend my first conference, which then encouraged me to attend many more, all contributing to my many experiences and where I am today, but that is for another blog.

At that first conference, I went to a networking session where I met a man who was very friendly and gave me very helpful and insightful advise. Fast forward a year and I meet him at the same conference introducing the keynote speaker. I found out that he is the Chief Security Officer at Fidelity Investments I approach him and tell him that I am interning at his company that coming summer. He told me that he remembered me and we caught up for a bit. He then gave me more very great advise. I also forgot to mention that this conference inspired me to work at this company. Honestly, I hadn't recognized the company name, nor did I know what they did. To me, it wasn't a tech company.

However, I was put in Enterprise Infrastructure and got really busy. One of the more fun projects I was tasked with was to come up with a gameplan to teach young children, especially young girls how to program and how to get them excited and engaged in computer science using a raspberry pi. My manager bought me a pi and a kit and I got to work. Although I wasn't able to see the activity through to the end, it was great getting to be involved with the planning.

It was also very interesting to see how our department's senior project is very beneficial in a real world industry sort of application. I was taught their agile methodology, which my senior project team used to complete our project with a startup company as our customer. Not only did we also need to present our projects as did the senior presentations, but my team also came in first place!

Noel was a great resource to me this summer, my entire team was. However, I learned more from him from a real world perspective than anything else that I did that summer. He gave me great advise when I was preparing to present and also to interview for a full time role. He also taught me how to look at problems from different angles and that I should never fall in love with a solution, but to fall in love with the problem. He was also a very sarcastic and funny guy which was refreshing but he also kept me on my toes.

I really value my time that I spent there in North Carolina at Fidelity Investments. I learned a great lot and I have also made many great connections.