How teamwork in your CSC courses at Berea has influenced your internship experience

 I have spent most of my time this week debugging different parts of the Android code for Microsoft Teams. I was required to spend time understanding how the new feature would fit in to existing Teams Mobile code since my internship project adds a new feature to Microsoft Teams Android and iOS clients. I spent the last two weeks organizing meetings with engineers that have worked on Teams Mobile to understand the codebase structure, how to test the different components of Teams Mobile, and ask questions about the technologies used to build the application. My experience from teamwork in Computer Science at Berea helped me to know when to reach out for help and how to develop good questions that get helpful answers.

A specific example is the Database Management systems course, which was a service-learning course, that I took last semester. This course consisted of a seven-week project where I worked in a team of five students to develop a search page for Feeding Kentucky. The project required frequent team and client meetings that helped me learn how to prepare for technical meetings. In preparation for the meetings, I had this week, I had least five concise questions to ask during the meetings, recorded the meeting for reference, and included other engineers like my mentor who have more experience with the topic of discussion. These meetings offered complete answers to the questions and insightful suggestions on the progress of my project that I plan to include in my engineering design document.

Another indirect way that the teamwork from my Computer Science courses has helped me is understanding that a project team is bigger than the direct team assigned to a project. Although I am the only intern working on my project with the help of one mentor, I am leveraging the help of engineers from different teams. For example, on Wednesday, my mentor and I were not sure how to test react-native code running in an Android emulator. After some minutes of research, I quickly asked my mentor and manager if they knew other engineers that work on react-native. My mentor introduced me to a full-time engineer on Microsoft’s office in China who shared resources on using the React Native debugger to test cross platform mobile applications. Receiving help from engineers inside and outside my organization has helped me resolve different bugs faster. I could only have acquired such skills from the Computer Science courses at Berea that encourage collaboration among professors, teaching assistants, and students. Teamwork at Berea taught me that reaching out for help is not a sign of incompetence, but a request for clarity on something challenging. Applying this past experience from Berea to my internship is reducing the time I spend stuck on challenges and providing diverse insights into my project.