Reflecting on Working at the Manulife RED Lab

My co-op ranking for this co-op term was an outstanding rating, the highest co-op rating possible.

The Culture

The RED Lab was separate from Manulife HQ intentionally to allow for an atmosphere that was more relaxed and allowed for more free thinking. The onboarding process was quick and helped set a good tone for how the term would be. We collaborated and were free to use any technologies we wanted. The full time employees were always available to ask questions and bounce ideas off of and this proved to be very valuable in my learning throughout the co-op term.

What I Learned

I was exposed to mobile development during this co-op term. We worked with ionic (cordova + AngularJS), Objective-C, and Java. Every 2 weeks we would have a demo of everything everyone was working on and hopefully a finished prototype. These demos improved my presentation skills, and there was a group project that culminated in presenting in front of Manulife executives to hear what they thought about our solutions to problems faced in the financial industries.

I also worked on projects that exposed me to some of the struggles colour blind people face and I also attempted to apply sentiment analysis to the insurance industry.

This post was taken from my old blog and was written June 2015