by Tarah on 5. June 2012 06:11
In the last semester of my Bachelor of Computer Systems at EIT I had to complete a paper that allowed for students to manage and complete a project of approved scope and difficulty, or an internship (provided they could find a company to take them on).
Having two and half years of study and projects already behind me I thought that an internship was the way to go. It would give me some industry experience, help me develop my skills further, and be more targeted to the industry I wanted to get into. Red Jungle gave me the opportunity to do this and I learned a ton.
During my time at Red Jungle I worked on multiple projects both in in a team and by myself. As I was very shy this was quite difficult. But being part of a team has helped develop my communication skills. In fact a few weeks ago one of the guys commented on the difference saying that he didn’t think he’d heard me even talk during my first week at Red Jungle. I am now planning to speak on a topic at the local .net user Group.
By far the most exciting, and somewhat scary, part of the internship was working with real code on a real product. Seeing software that you have been part of developing go live is pretty awesome. While I was at Red Jungle, Windows Phone 7 emerged along with the WP7 SDK. I had the chance to develop an application for the Windows Phone which was uploaded to the marketplace here beside other apps from Red Jungle . As I don't have a Windows Phone this motived me to re-build the game on another platform, WebOS, so that i could play it too!
I learnt about new technologies (well, they were new to me!) and techniques and how to create a rich user experience in a web application by combining things like MVC .Net, jQuery, and Javascript. I made mistakes and I may have broken the build a couple of times, but I had a great group of people providing guidance and mentorship.
For several students, including myself, internships resulted in a job at the company they worked. I've been working at Red Jungle full time since the completion of my course. It has been great to see some of the things I did during my internship move forward and take on new challenging tasks too. A big thanks to everyone at Red Jungle - Gerard, Matthew, Phil - for the awesome support!