Hi! I'm Juan, and I worked with ICER in the spring of 2024 on the ColdFront team. If you're reading this, you might be on the ColdFront team or another exciting project. Either way, congratulations on making it to the team! You should be proud of securing this job, which offers significant opportunities for students looking to advance their careers.
Here is some advice that I would have loved to know when I first started working with ICER:
Questions, questions, questions. There are two sides to this story: First, be prepared to ask questions, even if you think they are out of focus or not super-extra-mega-insightful. Chances are, you could be on the right path and their answer will push you closer to your goal. Alternatively, you might be a little lost, and their answer will help guide you to achieve your task.
Secondly, be prepared to be asked questions that you don't know how to answer. Unlike school, here you are exploring new areas with a skill set that you learned doing something else, which means there is a high probability that you won't know the answer to everything. This is okay! You shouldn’t feel ashamed of asking for extra guidance on a task or topic. This is what an internship is about: learning! The more you learn, the more useful you become.
Keeping a record. Most people worry about logging a specific number of hours a week, just like I did. Although meeting the required time is very important, I would have focused more on writing down a record of my progress and the things that I was learning (just like taking notes in class). I often felt that I forgot what I had learned recently, like a command or even the name of something. Again, this is about learning, so you can take time to write notes which make it easier to review later!
Block your calendar. Don't block a contact named "calendar" on your phone, please. If you are not familiar with this term, it refers to creating events in your calendar designated for specific tasks. It serves both as a reminder and a commitment, because if you need to do something else during a block in your calendar, you have to make time somewhere else within the week. This is especially useful when working from your computer as it's easy to get distracted by homework or even forget and take on other commitments. This strategy helped me remember and visualize the work I had to put into my tasks every week as an ICER intern.
Share what you are doing! Try the duck method or even explain what you are working on to friends and family. I did this towards the end of the semester at UURAF when I presented my work as a poster to friends and strangers. I realized that communicating my ideas in a format that other people could understand quickly helped me have a better grasp of what my job was and how I was making a positive impact on the team!
Be curious. This can go many ways, and all of them are good as long as you don't break the master branch (which is unlikely to happen). In my case, I became curious about a project that my mentor mentioned in one of our weekly intern meetings. I was intrigued by his idea and started working on it. It then turned into an actual project of mine, which I was really excited to showcase on my poster as a result of my time with ICER. You should be open to sharing your career interests with your mentor, and they will surely introduce an exciting idea or opportunity for you to work on and learn more.
ColdFront specific. When you get started with the ColdFront portal, there will be many things that you might not be familiar with. I suggest taking time during your weekly work to go through the repository structure and its files to understand their purpose. I did this later in the semester when I was working on a very specific UI change. I spent a lot of time changing things in coldfront-core without knowing that coldfront-theme was overriding its HTML.
If you have any questions or want to get a conversation going, I am happy to do so at my email: [email protected]
Best of luck being an ICER intern!