Intern Spotlight: Top 3 Insights from Terentia’s Co-op Students

Photo: By Markus Spiske on Unsplash

We’ve come to a close on our latest internship session at Terentia, with seven fantastic co-ops as part of the Terentia team this past semester.

But, before school starts up again (as does our next internship session), we wanted to take the opportunity to ask a few from our current group of co-op students some questions about their experience with the program, what they learned, and what wisdom they can share with other students and anyone looking to get more experience with programming and development.

What was your favorite part about working at Terentia?

“My work was in a working system that people are looking at and using. It added a nice sense of accomplishment to be able to say: "We built that, and people are using it!". – Patrick Williamson

 “One of my favorite things is the supportive and friendly work environment. Working with a team of kind people who are willing to listen, help and support you is such a good thing.” – Nesrin Alshawaf

 “Definitely the wide breadth of subsystems that we had the chance to work on. Whether it was creating different front-end components on the UI, setting up data flows using the back-end services, or writing Azure functions to interface with cloud storage, each of us had the opportunity to try different aspects of the system to get a real feel for what we enjoyed and excelled at most.” – Mark Kawucha

 “Making friends and connections along the way.” – Vincent Mark

What was one of the biggest lessons you learned at Terentia?

“The exposure to many new technologies and subsystems really highlighted to me the importance of research. Through proper researching, experimentation and testing, I was able to build a working solution to situations that arose.” – Mark

“The beginning is always the hardest. I had no experience in this area outside of school, but now after eight months, I'm much more confident and knowledgeable.” – Nesrin

What advice do you have for programmers/developers or anyone who is still in school and looking to get more experience?

“Try and keep up with new frameworks and languages, and tailor your resumes for postings. Put the languages and skills they look for front and center instead of a generic list of everything you know.” – Patrick

“Learn how to read documentation. It is a very underrated skill that they don't really teach in school. In school, they give you access to documentation, and they teach you how to write documentation, but they don't teach you how to actually read the documentation of web apps and frameworks/libraries. Whatever problem you may encounter, the answer can most likely be found somewhere in the documentation.” – Vincent

“Take every chance to learn more. Do not be limited to what you learn in school there is a lot to discover and learn on your own. Don't feel bad if you don't know much yet or have a lack of experience, every senior developer has been in your spot at some time.” – Nesrin

“I'd say the biggest piece of advice I can give to developers who are in school still is to really go the extra mile and immerse yourself in technologies that are congruent to those you learn about in your studies. It really helps paint a brighter picture of the ecosystem of a software when you aren't limiting yourself to the few fundamentals that are taught in class. There's not enough time in the world to teach students about everything in just a few courses so take it upon yourself to dive deeper and really draw from the resources that might be available elsewhere.” – Mark

If you’re interested in an internship or career at Terentia, send us a note: careers@terentia.io.