An internship at CIRU
Blog written by Evelina Ivanova & Oana Paul, Software Developers, CIRU.
We are two Masters of Engineering Computer Science students from the University of Southampton, who are graduating this year (on paper at least), and as our internships are coming to an end, it’s time for us to reflect back on our experience working as Software Development interns at CIRU.
Like most university students going into their final year, we were looking into doing an internship during the summer. For us it wasn’t our first foray into the working world as we already had completed internships during our previous summer and this time we were seeking to take on more responsibilities. We were in luck as this is exactly what we found at CIRU whilst working within the KITE (Know how Ideas that Excite) team.
We were part of a team of interns and were directly involved with real world projects, which gave us the opportunity to experience many aspects of the real world working life such as meeting clients, taking and implementing client’s feedback as well as attending workshops designed to help users’ understanding of the system we worked on. Whilst we already had experience working in numerous team projects during our time in university, there was still a lot to develop and improve on in regards to our team-based skills. We had to get used to communicating our daily progress to the team and make sure that everyone was up to date with what we were doing, especially as sometimes we would be working remotely.
The project we were most involved in was a web-application used by doctors in the Hampshire area called Revalid, which focuses on helping doctors with their appraisals and revalidations. The work on this project included implementing new functionality and finding and fixing existing bugs (as well as the ones we introduced ourselves oops). While working on Revalid we learnt many new technologies such as PHP’s Symfony and Docker, which proved to be quite useful in our fourth year as our fourth year projects involved web development and using docker containers.
One thing that made working at CIRU such a pleasurable experience was the working environment, being surrounded by welcoming and friendly co-workers all the time really made going into work something we looked forward to. At the start of our internships, we went on a company away day, where we got to properly meet and get to know everyone.
As aforementioned, in this internship we were given more responsibility by having projects whose successful development directly relied on us. Another aspect of this internship that stood out compared to our prior ones was the fact that we continued the work during the academic year. Thanks to this, we were put in a situation where we had to improve our time management skills and work on finding the right balance between university, work and personal time. It definitely proved a challenge, but we managed to overcome it and definitely came out both better students and workers at the end of it.
The skills and lessons we learnt during this year long internship were an integral part of our success in landing a graduate job. So we’d like to thank everyone working at CIRU for all the help they’ve given us and all the wonderful experiences we’ve shared over the past year, and wish them well for the future.