How internships shaped my career as a developer
About the author: Piyush Anand is pursuing his B.Tech from Bhartiya Vidyapeeth College of Engineering. He shares how internships helped him explore and start a career as a developer.
After realising how important websites are for most businesses, I began exploring web development as a career option last year. Besides learning what was taught in college, I started learning React.js, Node.js, and other web development technologies. Once I completed some projects, I wanted to put my learning into practice and began applying for internships.
Even though I was able to land an internship through Internshala, getting started was a bit hard. I applied for thirty internships before getting selected for two internships. I decided to go ahead with the one at GoSensing, a startup that provides web development and digital marketing services.
The selection procedure for the internship consisted of interviews and an assignment. During the first interview round, they just confirmed my availability for the internship. Next, they asked me to share the web development projects that I had worked on. After assessing my projects, they gave me a paid front-end development assignment and hired me a few days later.
During my internship, I mostly worked on front-end projects such as designing the landing pages that a user sees when they click on a Google ad. They gave me some templates and the content that needed to be added to the web pages. Since new ideas were always welcome, I suggested creating a front-end Google sheet contact form as it was simpler to design than a back-end one. This turned out to be an efficient solution, and we implemented it.
This internship experience helped me secure my next internship at iDigizen, an online learning platform for kids. The selection procedure for this internship was similar to the last one and consisted of interviews and an assignment. They went through the code I had used in my projects and gave me an assignment related to React.js and MongoDB.
On the first day, I interacted with six other interns from the tech and marketing teams. We were then divided into teams of two to work on different parts of the project. They also assigned various parts of the code to each team and asked us to create presentations that explained what was happening in the code. This task helped them evaluate how much of the code we understood.
On the same day, our mentors also informed us that we would be working on new technologies such as Next.js and GraphQL. As I wasn’t well-versed with these technologies, they gave me the time to learn them and shared helpful resources for the same. Throughout the internship, I constantly learned something new such as different concepts related to databases. Moreover, my mentors were open to suggestions and gave me constructive feedback about them, which I found helpful.
During the eight weeks of the internship, I worked on bulk sign-up, which allowed the admin to sign up multiple users in one go. Another project that I worked on was the coin referral system. In addition to these projects, I learned about the corporate culture. Our mentors taught us how to build a rapport with our co-workers and help each other when problems arise. So, apart from new technical skills, I learned how to work in teams. I also got a chance to teach some high school students about web development which helped me explore a different side of this field.
These internship experiences gave me an edge during my placements, and I have received job offers from Nagarro and Cognizant. During the interview rounds, I was asked about my experience at the two companies, and the interviewers were quite impressed with my internship projects and the quality of work that I did.
Now that I know about the role internships play in one’s career, I encourage all my juniors to do internships. Most companies today look for candidates who can hit the ground running from day one, and I believe internships prove that you can do that.
Are you excited to start a career in web development? Then, get going with these web development internships.
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