What I Learned From My High School Software Internships

After finishing my last internship over the summer, I’ve reflected back on how much I’ve grown since my first internships, largely thanks to the great mentorship and trust afforded to me by others. I feel incredibly lucky to have had these experiences (though I did work hard at getting them!) and wanted to share them for others in case they provide any insights :).

UCalgary XR Lab Researchship

This one was a semi-internship I did during the summer of tenth grade; it was unpaid, part-time, and did not have many expectations attached to it. I found out about this opportunity after having participated in a UCalgary student-run hackathon - the organizers sent out an email to all the participants because they knew some labs with graduate students who were open to mentoring and having high school students do work related to their thesis projects.

After filling out a short form about my interests and programming experience, I had a short on-campus interview at a mixed reality lab and was invited to spend some time over the summer working on a project at the lab on the Microsoft HoloLens. It was incredibly exciting to be part of that environment and working with cool tech, and was my first time doing any remotely professional software development.

There, I had my first exposures to Agile development (something I had no idea I’d end up using in all my future internships), regularly presenting my progress to others, and trying to make my code more readable/maintainable. We were given a lot of independence with how to go about our work, but still had to balance that with the grad students’ needs.

Although my work there wasn’t of the highest quality or importance, I was proud of what I was able to accomplish (a little home security simulation in Unity) and am grateful to have had the opportunity. It’s funny to look back and realize that my version control method at the time was copying all my files into a new folder and incrementing the version number…

Arcurve

After my experience at the XR lab, I was determined to keep finding cool summer software opportunities, which is what led me to look for companies in Calgary hiring for interns. Of course, I quickly realized that they were seeking to hire university interns if any, so my keen 11th-grade self began to cold email hiring managers and CEOs at some of those local companies. A few of them replied, and one of them even followed through, leading to my first paid internship!

Arcurve is well-known among the Calgary tech community for their amazing internship program, community initiatives, great software/consulting work (of course), and more. With high school summers lasting only two months, they didn’t have much time to train and assign me much work, but it felt pretty surprising how much I was able to do with their help. After official on-boarding (the first time is quite exciting!) I started by working on some Power BI dashboards, and later moved onto helping another intern with a TypeScript data visualization tool.

That summer felt so transformative - I was somehow trusted to do some real work with stakeholders, felt out of my depth numerous times, learned a tremendous amount both technical and otherwise, and of course had a ton of fun with the other interns.

I returned to Arcurve for 7 months part-time between graduating high school a semester early and starting university, and during that time my work really ramped up.

For the first time, I was faced with a truly frustrating challenge - hunting an elusive bug that only affected a small percent of users. I spent weeks testing, learning the system as best I could, and tracing through the backend and database, but in the end I couldn’t figure it out. It was definitely a disheartening experience that made me doubt my abilities and whether I deserved to be working there, but I think it helped me develop honesty, fortitude, and eventually self-confidence despite failures. Even though I didn’t achieve the desired end result, I still came in every day reporting and documenting my progress, coming up with new ideas to try, and eliminating possibilities. When the task was passed on to someone else who was more of a subject matter expert, I’m glad I could help them with important processes and facts documented to save them a lot of time.

Another time I felt like I disappointed my company was when we were given the opportunity to earn AWS certificates for free - we could even take some time on the job to learn, and Arcurve would pay our exam fees! It sounded like (and was) a great opportunity, so I jumped at it and began studying. Unfortunately, after many weeks, things just weren’t clicking for me and I just found it really difficult to keep remembering concepts, and I remember dreading the task of continuing on, but doing so anyway because I didn’t want it to all be a waste (both for me and the company).

Eventually, I mustered the courage to tell my manager that my heart wasn’t in it and I wouldn’t be able to get the certificate despite the time I’d spent. Though they were a bit shocked, and maybe even a bit disappointed at this (I don’t remember), they also understood and supported my choice at the time, and it was a big weight lifted off my shoulders.

Apart from the lows, there were also great highs. Throughout all this, I did what I think was some pretty good work on various software projects, some of which went smoothly, and some of which were more tricky (but that made them more satisfying). I was given the task of lead developer on a serious project for a client after four months. The project was a full-stack intuitive scheduling tool for time-sensitive operations that needed to be updated frequently and viewed in real-time. Apart from the obvious technical learnings, I also learned to start asking the right questions to the right people, take more initiative, manage expectations, suggest compromises, and more. The project went great, and gave me so much confidence in my ability to grow and go beyond what I thought was possible for me.

Main Learnings

Firstly, I just want to mention that looking back, it’s amazing that I was never made to feel like I was “too young” to be trusted with something. I can’t believe real corporate clients saw me (an 11th grader) leading the software development of their project, talked to me almost every day, and treated me like a real coworker. OK, maybe they got a discount, but still! That was such an important aspect of me enjoying my work and learning so much, so thank you to anyone who is open-minded like that.

My first learning from these experiences is to put yourself out there. I wouldn’t have gotten that cool summer research experience unless I went to that hackathon (which I didn’t win), read that email, and applied for the program. Even crazier, I wouldn’t have had my amazing experiences at Arcurve unless I’d emailed a bunch of local CEOs to ask if they’d consider me for an internship. I had a spreadsheet where I was tracking responses and there was a huge block of red-coloured rows where I received rejections and countless no-replies from the previous rounds of emails. 

My other main learning is that failures and uncomfortable experiences truly do make you stronger and build character, so they’re not necessarily something to be avoided. At Arcurve, I was asked to choose between working on searching for that bug I couldn’t find vs. a more straightforward task in my comfort zone. I almost certainly would’ve avoided embarrassment if I chose the straightforward task, but I would’ve learned much less technically and maybe even dealt with failure worse when it eventually would’ve happened. Now, I’m much less stressed about telling people negative news, or letting them know that I’m struggling with something.

Finally, I think that people, opportunities, and even yourself will positively surprise you if you go in with a good mindset, work ethic, and personality. Things won’t always be easy or go your way, but those setbacks are usually temporary.

I hope that this helped provide or reinforce some insights or learnings, no matter what stage of life or career you are in. Please feel free to leave your own in the comments!

Until next time,

Ana