My Experience at Helpful
My name is Emily Cho and I’m a 19 year old Mechatronics Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. In order to complete my degree at UW I must complete at least 6 co-op terms during my five years of undergrad. For my second internship I stumbled into my position at Helpful.
When I first signed my offer for Helpful I was not aware of what the company was or what the job entailed. As a new start up I couldn’t just google the company or the employees. Needless to say, I was nervous about what I was committing to. While the right start up can present the best and most exciting opportunities, it can also be a risky choice for a co op student. Despite all this I joined the company with an open mind.
Right off the bat, I got to work on a small feature while pairing with another co op. This allowed me to really get into the code right away and start learning by doing. While at other companies it may take weeks to get through all the training or documentation required to do anything, at Helpful the onboarding was quick and efficient.
In addition, the pair programming was a huge benefit. Pairing provided an unique environment where I could practice my own coding skills while being coached by someone with more experience. This vastly improved the quality of my own code. During my term I focused mostly on the front end code which was done in Swift. Coming into this co op I had no experience in this language but, due to pairing, I was able to learn it much more quickly than if I was to learn the language alone.
Another experience that was very valuable to me, and largely unique to Helpful, was how much I was allowed to and even encouraged to participate in company affairs. As a new(ish) company Helpful had many exciting new developments over the last term. From updates to the marketing campaign to features that changed the core functionality of the app, the co ops were consistently included in the meetings and encouraged to ask questions and make suggestions. This was made even more exciting by the amazing leaders at Helpful. Daniel Debow (CEO) and Farhan Thawar (CTO) really lead the team by demonstration. With both of their impressive experience they taught the entire team, co ops including, many valuable lessons. These included how to start a successful company, how to cultivate company culture, and how to build technically sound growth.
All in all working at Helpful was an invaluable experience where I got to work with talented engineers on real engineering tasks, learn from amazing leadership, and be a part of a growing and flourishing company. I will never forget this experience and I am happy to say it truly helped me be a better and more well rounded engineer.
FYI while the founders of Helpful did ask me to write a post they had no influence as to what went into it. The ideas here are completely my own.
