I started my internship writing up a blog-post, so perhaps it is only fitting that it concludes with me writing one.
While this may make my experience seem circular—it is anything but. Indeed, it is only when we come back to similar circumstances that we can truly appreciate how much we’ve grown.
My philosophical inquires aside, we must come to the question of the hour: What did I do as an intern at KTBYTE for the past 10 weeks?
Ben prefaced the internship by saying that we (the interns) would be spearheading KTBYTE’s first-ever Workshop program. The Workshops were designed to be smaller, more flexible-classes that taught students programming through specific applications. My workshop – “An Audible Introduction to Java” – focused on how we can use programming to make music-related software.
As I soon began to learn, spearheading a workshop takes much more than just teaching a class. You must work to get students for your class. You must schedule said students. You must create interesting content for your students. You must teach and evaluate your students. Then you must seek to improve all facets of the process, designing better workflows and developing better software tools so that the Workshop program may make students and teachers happy for generations to come.
In my time here, I’ve called parents to market my workshop, sent maybe 1,000,000 scheduling emails, created four audio-projects that I’m so proud of I actually tell my friends, designed report cards for my students, helped implement and develop a task-tracking workflow that will (hopefully) make the lives of all-involved with KTBYTE easier, learned some REACT, some Active JDBC, some TWIG, some client, and some server (I’d like to think I’m now a javascript wizard), taught my own classes and even helped TA some other ones, and, yes, I’ve even helped install a white board.
As you can see, this summer I have worked the full stack: operations, marketing, teaching, software-development, and mechanical engineering? This was, by design. For sometimes, in-order to truly understand how to improve processes, you need to experience them, as they are all interconnected. I’ve learned a whole lot and truly do have a better appreciation of what it takes to run a business. I’m very thankful for this deeper perspective.
One thing implicit in all things listed above was that I got to work with the KTBYTE staff. I got their undying support and patience and care! When finding a job, most people perhaps do not consider who they will work with. I certainly didn’t consider it, but I’ve realized it is perhaps one of the most important things. You want people who are kind and inspire you to be better. Everyone at KTBYTE has inspired me to be better in some way—whether it be coding, teaching, or just as a human. Perhaps the biggest testament to their kindness is putting up with me and my idiosyncrasies for the past 10 weeks–thanks.
I will close on an anecdote. When working on the task-tracking workflow, Leo and I needed a way to create a unique ID for some elements. As, I tried to come up with algorithms that converted strings to numbers and Leo questioned whether we really needed unique IDs, it became clear after half-an-hour that we were struck. We consulted the wisdom of Chi Bong, who in about 1 minute gave us a very elegant solution–we had a good laugh. I’m not sure exactly what the metaphor here is, but if anything, it’s that we are always learning and helping each other and that we don’t take things too seriously.
Work is not supposed to be fun, but I can genuinely say I’ve had fun at KTBYTE. It’s going to be bittersweet leaving–of course I won’t have to wake up early to teach a China class, but I’m gonna miss everything and everyone. Cheers
Checkout our workshop classes here!
[wpforms id=”2359″ title=”true” description=”true”] Software Engineer Intern Feature – Vishnu
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AuthorMarc Bucchieri
AuthorMarc Bucchieri 
I started my internship writing up a blog-post, so perhaps it is only fitting that it concludes with me writing one.
While this may make my experience seem circular—it is anything but. Indeed, it is only when we come back to similar circumstances that we can truly appreciate how much we’ve grown.
My philosophical inquires aside, we must come to the question of the hour: What did I do as an intern at KTBYTE for the past 10 weeks?
Ben prefaced the internship by saying that we (the interns) would be spearheading KTBYTE’s first-ever Workshop program. The Workshops were designed to be smaller, more flexible-classes that taught students programming through specific applications. My workshop – “An Audible Introduction to Java” – focused on how we can use programming to make music-related software.
As I soon began to learn, spearheading a workshop takes much more than just teaching a class. You must work to get students for your class. You must schedule said students. You must create interesting content for your students. You must teach and evaluate your students. Then you must seek to improve all facets of the process, designing better workflows and developing better software tools so that the Workshop program may make students and teachers happy for generations to come.
In my time here, I’ve called parents to market my workshop, sent maybe 1,000,000 scheduling emails, created four audio-projects that I’m so proud of I actually tell my friends, designed report cards for my students, helped implement and develop a task-tracking workflow that will (hopefully) make the lives of all-involved with KTBYTE easier, learned some REACT, some Active JDBC, some TWIG, some client, and some server (I’d like to think I’m now a javascript wizard), taught my own classes and even helped TA some other ones, and, yes, I’ve even helped install a white board.
As you can see, this summer I have worked the full stack: operations, marketing, teaching, software-development, and mechanical engineering? This was, by design. For sometimes, in-order to truly understand how to improve processes, you need to experience them, as they are all interconnected. I’ve learned a whole lot and truly do have a better appreciation of what it takes to run a business. I’m very thankful for this deeper perspective.
One thing implicit in all things listed above was that I got to work with the KTBYTE staff. I got their undying support and patience and care! When finding a job, most people perhaps do not consider who they will work with. I certainly didn’t consider it, but I’ve realized it is perhaps one of the most important things. You want people who are kind and inspire you to be better. Everyone at KTBYTE has inspired me to be better in some way—whether it be coding, teaching, or just as a human. Perhaps the biggest testament to their kindness is putting up with me and my idiosyncrasies for the past 10 weeks–thanks.
I will close on an anecdote. When working on the task-tracking workflow, Leo and I needed a way to create a unique ID for some elements. As, I tried to come up with algorithms that converted strings to numbers and Leo questioned whether we really needed unique IDs, it became clear after half-an-hour that we were struck. We consulted the wisdom of Chi Bong, who in about 1 minute gave us a very elegant solution–we had a good laugh. I’m not sure exactly what the metaphor here is, but if anything, it’s that we are always learning and helping each other and that we don’t take things too seriously.
Work is not supposed to be fun, but I can genuinely say I’ve had fun at KTBYTE. It’s going to be bittersweet leaving–of course I won’t have to wake up early to teach a China class, but I’m gonna miss everything and everyone. Cheers
Checkout our workshop classes here!
[wpforms id=”2359″ title=”true” description=”true”]