I co-oped at two different places: Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, and ChoiceStream, an online ad company. I did web development on internal applications for both.
At Novartis, I worked on a few applications for creating and managing samples for the oncology department. I don’t have a good biology background, so the technical jargon was a challenge. The development team was casual, but there was some overhead with planning meetings, getting approvals, and establishing a good base design down before development. This is reasonable though as its a multinational company and a lot of people rely on the integrity of the data. My mentor here was more of a scientist beginning but over the years he drifted into software development. A few of the other co-ops’ majors here were CS/Biology, Bioinformatics, and Math/CS. Overall, my experience here was wonderful! I still keep in touch, but I’d like to explore my interests.
ChoiceStream was smaller and more casual, and they had the incredible snack shelf and Bagel Fridays! A lot more goes into ad placement than I’d known (like how some of their developers use AdBlock! Gasp, their products worked too well!). I worked on some applications to track and generate ad campaigns here. I did a bit of automation with a tool called Chef, which had a bunch of cooking references for sub or related technologies (Cookbooks, Recipes, Kitchen, Knife, etc). Just pointing that out since many technologies today use common words in other fields for naming. In a way it’s helpful because the comparisons relate to the task, but it can also get confusing. It makes it sounds like I can cook, but really, I can’t.
In the workforce, you need to be able to communicate with a variety of people: other developers; management lead; users, whether they are scientists or ad operations; and HR. My main problem is my anxiety. It makes it difficult for me to ask for clarification, which is vital in tech, or really any field, where disciplines intersect. I also tend to have a soft voice with those I’m unfamiliar with. My supervisor joked about creating a curriculum to remedy that. It started off with, “Yell as loud as you can at standup!” Anyway, sorry to my group in advance!
I need to really think about what I want to do after I graduate (in…9 months? Oh, dear…). I’d like to get into game development to help people though, so I joined the ReGame VR Lab after researching for the first writing assignment. I’m starting off simple first, but so far, I really enjoy it!
