For this summer, I am working with a team of 4 to develop a modernized version of their mobile application. I am finally moving from browsing websites to developing apps for my phone. After about a week of silence, we finally met with our community sponsor and got off to a friendly start. But I wasn’t sure what to write down as my purpose for this summer. When I signed on to complete this internship, I mainly saw it as an opportunity to hone my technical skills. I wasn’t sure how to apply these skills in an ethical context.
However, during reflection, I realized that I could use this time to also improve my capabilities as a team member. Personally, I became rather self-centered over the course of this semester due to high amounts of stress. I noticed that I became defensive and angry easily, which hindered my ability to connect with others. This led to my decision to focus on being a better team member. I defined being a good team member as being able to provide and receive constructive feedback, remaining calm through the work process, and staying focused on the main tasks for each week.
So for this week, our team decided to focus on initial design and implementation. I was surprised by the plethora of ideas that came during our team’s brainstorming sessions. These ideas included a night mode switch, an interactive news feed, and adding a maps feature. I then put these ideas into action by programming a prototype with my extensive (2 week) experience in the programming language of choice. However, our team is making a good amount of progress, and I’m excited to see where the team goes next. Our main concern moving forward is testing our prototype on multiple devices, which we hope to resolve next week.