Internship extenstion until end of year
I was first brought on to Ellucian by applying online for a different position and with the help of an internal recommendation. Starting the internship on the 18th of May 2020. I worked there for 12 weeks and finished a production ready dashboard. A sample of that dashboard can be seen here. Near the end of that 12 week contract my manager was able to push to keep me on for the end of the year. Since I want to keep my blog posts separated by tags. I will leave this post as a personal coverage of experience as an intern at Ellucian. If you would like to see more on the dashboard and how it was made see my post here.
I am used to contract work with Ellucian. My previous position at the help desk had me as a contractor for 8 months. This contract however was much shorter. I felt a real urgency to prove myself. That I could be useful to the team and was worth adding in as a full time employee. I knew it was possible as a intern from last season was hired on full time. However, my competition was strong as the selection process was tough. Out of over a thousand interns screened less than 25 were brought on across the country. From some of the best schools. During our meet and greet introduction meeting I was paying attention to everyone's story. As each intern introduced themselves I took note of their degree and college/university. They were all from fantastic well funded schools. As far as I could tell I was the only one from a community college. This gave me a great sense of imposter syndrome. I felt as though I was not on the same level as everyone else. They were all so smart and had all the resources they need to be successful. I am confident in myself in that if I work hard I know I can match what others do. I knew if I worked hard and studied everyday I could prove to be on their same level.
So, we meet with top level managers and project leads. Even getting to meet the CEO and head of HR. The project leaders all explain their current work and what they see themselves needing help with. I take pages of notes on everything, who someone is, what their title is, what they do, what they said. I use this to keep my goals current and find the best direction. At the end of meeting all the leaders. We are asked what team we would like to join and what project. I join with 2 others to assist in a project on AWS to automate and modernize our work using Ansible. Knowing what I knew then I felt it was the best option and I really connected with the project leader. Little did I know this was the worst project to join.
I message the project lead and form a group chat with everyone involved. I also email the project lead about getting the proper access for the systems needed. Nothing is getting responded to. I ask each of my team members if there they have gotten any response from our lead. Only one has and it was saying that nothing is setup and it will take a while. A week passes and no new information was being provided. The lead was not answering any message. I was worried about the situation. I felt that maybe this was due to COVID and this was easier in person before. However, after a week past the date we were told something would be ready. I was losing hope in the project. I luckily still had my list of other projects. I reached out to members of other projects, asking how theirs was going. I found another group which I had on my 2nd choice for a project. Their project was started and had need for more help. I spoke to my manager and was able to switch to a new project.
The new project had two other interns who would become good friends of mine. While only one is staying as an intern who I still work with today. Our project was to create a dashboard in React which would dynamically pull the latest info from Jenkins about different clients and jobs. Basically showing if they are up and if the task was completed or failed. Like I said there is a sample live you can see here. This sample does not have all the production features but can give you a good idea of what it does. We developed that dashboard from scratch. Making use of a package called ag-grid to develop the grid. Our backend work was handled by one of us while me and the other intern worked on the front-end and connecting the backend. We had trouble getting started but quickly found ourselves in a groove once we entered the last few weeks of the internship.
The end of the internship came with a presentation. We did a 5 min recording which covered what we did on the project.
YouTube 5m presentation
All the interns submitted their presentations and everyone's work was shown. I am proud of the work I was able to complete and I was glad to be able to work on it. The project is used daily as it is in production. That was the end of my official 12 week internship.
The situation with COVID as of August was not slowing and many companies were under or soon to be. The U.S.A. was hitting 61,000 daily new cases of COVID in August when my internship was ending. Ellucian was cutting back benefits and despite being a multi billion dollar company they could not afford to keep any interns. It was the last week of our internships. No one was being kept on and our contract was going to end.
Our manager wanted to keep the interns on and simply asking was not enough. He needed to present the costs and risk involved in keeping interns for an extended amount of time. His job was not to assess cost and risk but he compiled everyone's graduation dates and availability into a form for upper management. Through his efforts we were able to get the news that internships were being extended until the end of the year 🙌
I was delighted to hear this news and I am currently still happy to be working at my position. I am still learning and developing. I am on a new project but have brought my old teammate to this one as well. I hope I can stay on and after I graduate in a few months I will see what kind of possibilities are open to me.