This summer, I interned at SAS as a Technical Intern on the Cloud Engineering team. My team is primarily concerned with maintaining and improving the cloud-based services used to support and deploy the SAS Customer Intelligence software, though I was tasked with improving the development process for any new engineers on my team. Specifically, I was tasked with creating
a brand new command line tool to streamline the development process so that new engineers could begin writing and deploying code for Cloud Engineering on their first day. As the project continued,
the project grew in scope to be a source of truth for time-saving scripts in the Customer Intelligence department at SAS.
Since this was a net new project, I was fortunate enough to learn the ins and outs on how a net new project is created for a company. I was able to learn how to manage the project using Agile
practices, and I also learned how to maintain and deploy a reliable codebase through a custom CI/CD pipeline that I created in GitHub Actions. Although this was my main project at SAS, I was also able to do some other smaller projects as well. One was the Data Story Challenge, which was a one day event where we were tasked with creating a unique data story based off of a publicly available dataset. I also was a final presenter for the Tools4Schools Data Drive, where many interns worked together to get school supplies donations for teachers through the non-profit Tools4Schools. As a final presenter, I helped create and present a presentation for the relevant stakeholders that detailed everything in the project, from overviewing the different roles to discussing the data received in the project.
The unifying theme between all of these projects has to be communication. When I got a Software Engineering internship, I figured that I would have to talk quite a bit, but I had no clue the
extent of it. I was in frequent meetings discussing tasks for a project, pair programming (or planning) with my teammates, or simply preparing for a presentation and asking for feedback. This
all culminated in a poster presentation that I delivered at SAS’ intern expo, where we created a poster for our project and then explained it to dozens of people who came to our poster. Being
required to communicate my work improved my communication skills, which I believe will serve me in all facets of life. For that, I am grateful! As for my future plans, I will be continuing my internship at SAS as a year-round intern, where I will be shifting gears a bit by learning more and hopefully contributing to Cloud Engineering projects in place today. There’s still more for me to learn, so I am excited to do what I
can to learn it all!
