Growing up I have always loved to program. My first experience with programming was teaching myself how to program in Python because my high school didn’t offer any programming courses. After graduating high school I knew I wanted a career in programming, so I went to Texas A&M to study computer science. Throughout my college career I have done 5 internships in a variety of industries. However, HCSS is unique and throughout my internship journey it now feels like home.
I first heard about HCSS online because it was named one of the best places to work through Glassdoor. When I interviewed I really felt like the culture could be another family. As I started my internship at HCSS I was given the opportunity to learn about C# and the other technologies that HCSS uses to build their products. My first few weeks here I was tasked with eliminating bugs, so that the rest of my internship could focus on a new initiative for HCSS Safety (one of our products).
The initiative that I worked on was integrating React ( a frontend web development framework) into HCSS Safety. The first two weeks of the project I worked on configuring the project so that we could deploy it with the new framework included and not break other pages. The remainder of my internship was focused on refactoring two pages into React, so that other developers could follow those example pages.
One thing that is unique about HCSS and its culture is being open to new ideas and suggestions. As an intern working with other full time employees on the team, this quality helped me feel comfortable doing the research and making suggestions about the decisions we should make about the project.
Another new experience for me during my internship was working with multiple teams. Aside from my coworkers in Safety, I worked closely with Ramon, a UX developer intern who was building a library of React components anyone at HCSS could use. During this new React initiative I also got to help guide an offshore team based in Costa Rica in building one of the new pages. The trust my team gave me, allowed my team to work on existing features while still moving towards React on the pages I was helping with.
These initiatives and projects helped me build a strong foundation for working with real world projects and teams before I graduate. This is something that not all of my fellow classmates get to do in one summer. I am super excited to join HCSS full time in December after I graduate!