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SchoolMint: Internship Days (2020)

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Thomas
Author
Thomas
Software Engineer, polyglot and I also love sports! Business inquiries to the email attached in my profile.
Table of Contents

March
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I was coming to my senses, having quit months ago my previous job in a local library (where I used to wear many hats; IT guy, salesman, clerk), and dealing with the hysteria created by the Coronavirus pandemic; Trying to adjust ends with my college tuition (my parents, due to recent economic downturns, were on the knife’s end and aggressively cutting on their expenses); Returning home with yet another failure from what was going to be my last in-person, engineering interview; and my Poodle dog Zucchini laying on her bed, feverish from her kidney disease; I wasn’t in the best place mentally when all of a sudden, isolation was imposed on us.

That same night, I decided to boot up my desktop machine. Same routine that I’ve been following since two years back - load up all job boards, put on my absolute novice blindfold, and proceed to fire away as many resumes as possible. For whatever reason, that night I ended my fruitless search a couple of hours later than I used to, and by chance, autopiloting job boards led me to another Greenhouse board, where I vaguely remember reading the words “Internship”, before my right hand moved on its own, and in a matter of seconds, I filled out the job opening form, and proceeded to click my worries away. The same generic application received email arrived at my inbox, as did hundreds of times before, when I was more enthusiastic avoid this job search. I shut down my computer, knowing it was only a matter of hours before the Unfortunately... application response crept into my virtual post office. Lights out.

An unexpected reply
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Shortly after the week was over, Zucchini had to be put down, if I hadn’t reached rock bottom - I thought - then I surely must’ve reached it at this point. I would be lying to you if I told you I didn’t taste full despair at that time of my life. Symbolically, I grabbed my razor and shaved my head bald, full buzz cut.

Unknown to me, this would mark also the time when I started shedding a lot of hair and suffering from male pattern baldness, if only I didn’t grab that damn razor and cherished my mane a bit more :^). But that wasn’t really the biggest surprise of the day. After showering and trying to force this feeling of having pressed the reset button, my eyes welcomed an email that had just arrived into my inbox, a phone screening for an internship opportunity, the company name: SchoolMint.

A few days later, I found myself in a mix of nonchalance and lukewarm hopes, becoming aware that this pandemic was going to change the job market forever, not necessarily to my favor, or so I thought. I was debating whether to buy myself a webcam for the upcoming screening, or listening to my insecurities and hiding this silly buzz cut in front of the white letters imprinted in the void background of what would be my meeting avatar, or lack of. I chose the latter and proceeded to click on the hyperlink mailed to my inbox that would lead me to my first virtual interview.

Mistakes were made
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To my surprise back then, this wasn’t your average phone screening, undertaken by the HR or talent acquisition person. No, I was getting interviewed by the technical lead of the SIS and PSE team. Those acronyms held no meaning in my mind, but there was a change in the script that life gave me, one that would lead me down to a long path of learning (one which I’m still walking through). I was starting to feel thankful that I didn’t opt for buying a webcam, otherwise this apparent string of luck would’ve stopped short the moment the camera turned on. Looking back though, it wasn’t the fact that I decided to keep myself camless that helped me survive this ordeal.

A brief conversation
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After doing the formal introductions, I was surprised by the brevity of what was going to be this “screening”. I was asked three questions:

  • Do you know versioning control?
  • Are you familiar with GNU/Linux?
  • Are you already familiarized with Docker?

Since I had my fair share of battling with Gentoo ever since 2018, knowing that I also had to work on different college projects and force myself and those who had the misfortune of working with me, to use git in order to organize our progress; I replied affirmatively to the first two questions, expanding more on the answers as technically as possible, while trying to remain fully confident, fully believing that this person at the other side of my screen was looking to probe me with another round of questions. After answering these three questions, my interviewer thanked me for taking these 15 minute phone screening and told me the company would reach out soon.

Well, here goes another badge, for getting rejected in record time - That’s what I mumbled to myself, after leaving the meeting. As Lester (the interviewer) had told me, a couple of days later, I received an email to my inbox. Right when I was about to flush my inbox, something in incoming email caught my attention, it wasn’t a Your application to... kind of rejection, hell it didn’t even indicate I was rejected at all: The title of the email was: SchoolMint SIS Intern - Job Offer. I couldn’t believe it. Was this finally the end of years of job searching?

April
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“Know that this will be your first, and only four months in this company. Whether you want to make of this internship a 9-5 job, a 2 hour past-time, or a dedicated space for your learning, that’s up to you.”

My mentor, or what I remember really, it’s been over four years, but the core meaning of that sentence, I applied until the end.

Make it count
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Working at SchoolMint was an entirely new experience for this 19 year old intern back then. Our initial team was shy of five folks (including myself). This was an experiment SchoolMint was running in order to free up their in-house engineers to work on more immediate projects, at the top of their priority list, for me, it was the last four months of my professional career, that I wanted to make count. With this mindset, I woke up every day of my internship at 4:00AM, to work on the daily tasks we were assigned to do. In retrospective, my internship days lacked variety; Wake up, boot up your machine, work on the implementation of data transformations and exports, standup, end the day. What I learned every day from my mentors, however, was a gospel that I would carry on for the rest of my days:

Experience Acquired
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  • I dived deeper into concepts such as meta-programming, as part of this job. (Thanks to Ruby’s philosophy of treating everything as an object + using JSON files for mapping those darn fields for exporting)
  • Sometimes I needed to work on custom transformations for our student exports, and that involved creating Ruby classes that would achieve those transformations (Concerns, as we called them back then)
  • Thanks to my previous suffering and skills acquired from installing Gentoo, I was able to set up our local development environments.
  • I was able to learn more about several concepts for my professional career that would help me develop more as a full-stack software engineer: Cloud computing, Containerization, staging & production environments and the importance of data parity, manual testing.
  • I was taught to be more optimistic, improving my listening skills (Listen, listen, then speak), and take more chances with ideas I suddenly had.
  • Following on the previous point I made some fairly simple automation scripts for reviewing our data transformations and mapping of fields for our exports, expanding more on my scripting skills (Shell, Go, Node.js and Python).

August
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Four months passed, and even though this wasn’t an internship:

  • working on a project previously relegated to oblivion - that is, until intern season kicks in and they’re assigned to bring back that idea from development hell
  • Working on a flagship product, along with the already-established engineering team, and gradually elevating your responsibilities to match your newly learned-skills

It was still an internship, in which boredom, set the creative cues in place for me, in order to trial (and error) many ideas that went ahead and made our whole process smoother, more automated, more documented. I thought of all ways to make those four months as fruitful for my career as possible, considering them an interbellum coming to an end, the struggle to find a job marked by my return to unemployment, or so I thought.

At the last day of my internship, I was offered to continue at SchoolMint, this time, as a full-time employee, holding the title of Associated Software Engineer. At last, light at the end of the tunnel, as I eagerly signed my offer letter, and formalized my adventures into the tech world, for the foreseeable future..