I had my second Co-op in EMC2 this Spring which is a data storage corporation. My job was to code in Python to test hardware. I have a cube and also a workspace in the lab. Beside taking about our work, we also chat about our lives some time. We had our own language which I could not understand anything in the first weekly meeting and that was the third day I started my Co-op. We had some software and website to do our job with is something similar with Oxygen and GitHub we use for this class. As an information science student, I’m more like a software guy but what I need to do was to test hardware which I didn’t have any experience with. Most of my coworkers are electronic engineers or computer engineers. I was the only female and the only software major. After 2 months, I was able to understand the hardware and develop software for testing. I think the work space was in an interdisciplinary level. If the problem was a hardware problem, I may not have the answer but if it’s a software problem, I had some ideas which was useful. I think this is the kind of job that I want to do after the graduation. I may not very outgoing but I do like to learn things and apply them into the work. I can learn things everyday and find some secret function about the website or the software and tell my coworkers. We always help each other and since I was the only female in the group and there are fewer females in this field, I feel my words mean something. I may look thing in a different way. Coding is kind of interesting when I can apply it not to the homework but to the real world. I still talk to people a lot, not only by emails but also face-to-face talking. I can’t face to my computer whole day without making a sound, I’m not a robot, but this job forced me to talk with my coworkers and solve the problem together no matter it’s a hardware issue or a software issue. I was happy that I could work in EMC2.
