Let’s start off with some background information first before we get into the story.

I started applying to internships during my third year of university and thought that I was already quite far behind my peers considering UBC’s computer science department encourages students to do an internship the summer after their second year. So there I was, a third year student without any industry experience and a lack of personal projects. Most of my friends were already at their first or second internship by the time I was wrapping up my third year of classes.

I recall reading a post from a friend that he was doing his first internship and was having an amazing time there. He was working at an innovation lab in downtown Vancouver called Momentus (at the time). This was also his first internship and I thought to myself “why not apply there?”. So this began my application to their website and to see if I would get a summer internship for myself. In addition to applying to Momentus, I also applied to a couple other local companies to try my luck since I wasn’t officially part of the UBC co-op program and I didn’t have any technical work experience under my belt. After a few short weeks, I got responses back from a few companies and all but one had rejected me. Momentus was giving me a chance for an on-site interview with their CTO and another employee. This was shocking to me since I had never done a coding interview before (which is generally expected for a technical internship) and the fact that I was getting interviewed by the CTO. Thankfully the interview went smoothly and without any hiccups although I was quite nervous. He said I would be getting a response back shortly within the next week and that would be their decision.

Another week went by and I got the long await email from their HR staff. They decided to accept me for 4 month long summer internship! I was beyond excited since I didn’t have any other options for internships that summer and if I didn’t get an internship, then I would have taken summer school instead.

During my 4 months there, I met an office full of fantastic people who worked with me on two separate projects. They gave me my initial exposure to many different technologies that companies use to build software products for their customers. These included Node.js, Jenkins, mongoDB, Django and React. The first project that I built was a web application for Shell called Geodesic that uses drilling data to give geologists and drillers a better visualization of their horizontal well. I created a 3D model using three.js that showed the drill’s trajectory and how it was moving. Note that I had no experience in computer graphics at all and did not take any computer graphics courses yet. This was integrated with the web application after first showing the Shell team my POC. Later on during Microsoft’s Ignite conference, it was even shown during part of their promotional video.

You can read more about Geodesic here.

The second project that I worked on was a prototype landing page for Signal where I assisted another dev in creating a 3D animation using React. This was a new experience for me since I had no experience in React at all. I had to integrate what I learned in Geodesic about 3D models and use it in React. This project was definitely more stressful since there was only the lead developer and me as the “dev team”. When we presented to the client, they were amazed and loved the product.

I wanted to thank everyone who I worked with at Momentus for their patience when working with a new intern. Without their encouragement and support throughout the short 4 months, I would not have been able to learn so much from them. Last of all I would like to thank David for giving me, a person with no technical work experience, the opportunity to intern at Momentus.

To all the students who haven’t done an internship and are wondering whether or not it is worth it to delay graduation for some experience, you should choose the internship experience!