Start Your Journey With An Internships
Start Your Journey With An Internship
Introduction
A recurring theme for my first and second year in school (Lincoln University, PA, USA) was the importance of a relevant internship experience. The primary aim of an internship is to provide you with industry or field experience, a “sample” of what your future holds. Given that students were allowed to change their majors (degrees), an internship gave you the opportunity to decide if the path you have chosen is the right one. A subtle aim of an internship is to secure an entry level position at the firm one interns with. Other benefits of an internship may include but are not limited to networking, skills acquisition, and relationships.
Do It…Really, Just Do It
An internship with the right firm will set your career on a trajectory beyond your expectations. Whenever I reminisce about my developer journey, I always come to the conclusion that I am here today due to my internship. I once wrote to my recruiter and teammates to thank them for the experience and skills I acquired while I was with them in California. When asked how I got to intern with Apple Inc. in Cupertino, my answer has always been “passion”. I was an A student but below an average developer. I was, however, passionate about learning and solving problems and they (Apple Inc) offered me that opportunity. During my internship, I learned (1) Ruby on Rails (which I still use till today), (2) About Restful APIs, (3) Ajax, (4) Python, (5) Git, (6) Sprints and standups, (7) Teamwork and leadership, and (8) a ton of soft skills.
My developer journey over the past three (3) years has been largely guided by what I learned during my internship. These choices transcend technical skills and impact my life philosophies. My experience made me a better person, and a better developer. Yours can too! But don’t take my word for it. Here are some other accounts of positive internship experiences.
Samuel W
“LEARNING IS A LIFESTYLE: This is one lesson I have learned deeply working with Afridash. In a period of 6 months, I was able to build things I could never have imagined. They kept my mind so engaged that I didn’t have time to doubt my abilities, so worry or not, work has to be done and I just had to get the work done. Afridash has a warm family environment where everyone is interested in the growth of everyone and even in their personal lives. There are times I struggled with the deadlines for a project because I didn’t know what to do and no one seemed to be “on my neck” about it rather they motivated me and extended my deadline a bit to be able to learn and build what I was asked to. I wasn’t given any dummy projects to work on, instead, I worked on real-life projects and this has been a valuable experience for me. For example, I was given the task to build www.afridash.com and this is live! It gives me great joy daily to see my work online being visited by a lot of people.”
George B
“I became an intern at Afridash Ltd with no experience in web development. I was scared of web development because it seemed so difficult. I lost my fears of web development at Afridash. I had the opportunity to work with and be coached by some of the most brilliant minds in this part of the world. I went from being a total newbie in web development to redesigning the company’s website Afridash.com within a month alongside some of my colleagues. I also learned more advanced skills like building Single Pages Applications with React.JS, Communicating with a RESTful API and lots more. Working on real projects like this really helped boost my confidence and accelerated my learning. One thing I really love about Afridash is the fun and caring environment. Afridash makes working and learning fun! Everyone is always willing to help and assist you with problems you face. I can boldly say my journey as a software developer started at Afridash.”
When? Where? How?!
I was impressed that internships are required from those pursuing a practical and/or science degree in Nigeria. This is the best time for you to gain useful experience, learn new technologies, and contribute to projects/products. An internship with the right firm will set you on a path to success.
At Afridash we only require that you demonstrate passion, and ability to learn by building ANYTHING before you apply. With this simple exercise, we can postulate that you are able to start and complete a project, as well as learn technologies.
There are literally over 1,001 companies out there, find a good place, start your career with a good internship. Expectations cannot be lower, you have all the room for growth, and you really cannot get it wrong.
Just do it.