The UT Dallas Computing Scholars Program Student Internship Success Stories: Amber Hasan
Amber Hasan is a senior in CS2 Program. She has spent two summers interning at USAA learning about and developing products in an Agile Environment. Her work includes the development of Android applications. She writes about the way that code-reviews and production-reviews operate at USAA.
Amber holds a black belt in Taekwondo and is an instructor of white-to-black belt students in this martial art. She has played the piano professionally for many years and is also proficient on other instruments. And beyond that, Amber also has amassed over 400 hours of medical experience during clinical rotations! Capturing all the extremely impressive experiences in this young woman’s short career is not possible in this short space.
Amber wrote the short piece below about her experience to help other students learn how to prepare for an internship and perhaps a career in industry:
For the past two summers, I have enjoyed interning at USAA as an IT Intern in the Plano office. It was through the career fair at UT Dallas when I was a sophomore that I secured my internship there. I was well prepared for this opportunity thanks to the coding workshops offered by the UT Dallas Computer Science department. By attending those workshops, I learned so many important skills, which I was also able to put on my resume.
Prior to interning at USAA, I had never before used Agile Development Tools, nor had I ever heard of Scrum, an agile framework for completing complex software projects. I learned how to code features in Android mobile applications, and the languages HTML and CSS used in web applications and was able to learn more about how the front end UI connects to the backend servers. During both summers, I also programmed in Java.
During my internship, I also learned how to use certain software tools to track how massive projects get broken down into stories, and how each story is assigned to a group and is further broken down into its own tasks. I also participated in daily stand-ups where the team stands in a circle and each person talks about what they accomplished on the previous day, what they plan to accomplish today, and any impediments that have emerged.
On top of coding in an Agile environment, I had several opportunities to have solo roles. One opportunity involved leading a demo at the end of the week where the interns would get together to show each other what they had worked on for that week. Another opportunity involved standing in front of the whole company as the microphone controller on the day when we had to deliver announcements to the employees of the company. There were also fun activities, such as participating in an optional intern video contest.
These internships at USAA helped me understand and participate in UT Dallas’ Software Engineering class more deeply because terms like “waterfall” and “agile” were no longer foreign concepts to me. My internships helped me answer future interview questions about software engineering styles, while my knowledge gained from UT Dallas helped me answer programming questions. Overall, my internship experiences have enhanced many of the important subjects learned at UT Dallas. It has been an extremely vital part of my computer science experience at UT Dallas.
Click here to read Karan Shukla’s internship story.
Click here to read Shayan Monadjemi’s internship story.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,100 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,000 MS master’s students, 150 PhD students, and 86 faculty members, as of Fall 2016. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.