Chapter 1. Atypical Internships with Adam Coholan
Hello, ciao, bonjour, and welcome to the first chapter of our Atypical Internship series! This article features Adam Coholan, a Niagara based intern working remotely for Ottawa-based company, Caseware IDEA.
A little bit about Adam
Adam is from St. Catharines (Ontario) and has been here ever since he could remember. He is an okay-ish golfer (at least among his family and friends) and enjoys being outside as much as weather permits. Anything from skiing to boating, you can find him adventuring outside living his best life.
Adam is also a 4th year computer engineering student from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and is doing a 16 month remote internship at Caseware IDEA.
At Queen’s University, engineering students are given the option of taking a 12 or 16 month long internship in their 3rd year. Adam, like most other students, was on the fence when deciding whether he should or should not take an internship. He was debating if the experience was worth pushing off his graduation by a year. To help in his decision making, he reached out to a few of his seniors who have taken an internship before (something that he recommends doing to build your network). A few calls and many great stories later, he decided he’d take the chance and look for an internship to gain experience in a field related to his study.
After a long recruiting season and submitting many applications to many companies later, he was offered a position at Caseware IDEA as a Full Stack Software Engineering intern.
What was the recruitment process like?
Adam interviewed for this company in March 2020, although the applications for this position started well before this (stay ahead of the game, apply to companies’ internship programs early). With his resume and cover letter in hand, Caseware IDEA decided Adam was a good candidate and requested a video interview that covered soft skills, technical skills, and an “unofficial” cultural fit test.
Before the interview, Adam did a lot of research on the position, company, and product that Caseware IDEA was working on. In the interview, he wasn’t trying to sell someone else or show off; he was just Adam. And some of the major reasons he got the position was because the interviewer was impressed with how well informed Adam was about the position and company and how genuine he was in the interview.
Do your research on the company and be yourself. That will give you a good idea what you’re interviewing for and the interviewer the best idea of who you are and if you’re a good fit for the role.
Adam’s internship experience
Adam has been working at Caseware IDEA since May 2020 and it has been an amazing experience so far. Even though he’s an intern, he was fully integrated as a team member working on the core product.
He partakes in more than just standup; he even participates in product planning and shadows in design meetings too. It’s very different than what he originally expected.
What project are you working on?
Adam joined the team at a pivotal time, just as they started a project from the ground up, giving him exposure to the entire product and development lifecycle.
With regards to development, there isn’t much he didn’t get to do. Anywhere from back-end to front-end and even communication & infrastructure (AWS), he’s got to experience it all. He made and reviewed PRs (pull requests) and contributed to the code base like any of his other colleagues.
Adam also had the opportunity to sit in on critical meetings that affected the course of development itself. He was there when they chose what technologies they were going to use (like React vs Angular) and shadowed in at product architecture meetings. He also presented his contribution to the project at biweekly meetings with the product stakeholders, using the feedback they gave to decide the next steps in development.
All in all, his work experience at Caseware IDEA has been at the level as a full time employee with the perks of being an intern.
How did Caseware IDEA support you during your online internship?
Caseware IDEA has done a lot to really show how much they value their interns. Between the company culture and individual support he gets, he says he feels fully integrated with a team of people he’s never met in person.
It turns out that his interviewer ended up being his paired mentor. Together, they have frequent check-ins where they discuss feedback among other important topics. He also has bi-weekly check-ins (although his manager’s door is always open) with his manager who is also his work term supervisor.
His coworkers are very friendly and they interact with each other online frequently. They even have a discord server where work and non-work related conversations take place. The one thing that really stands out is every single person he works with is open to him and doesn’t hesitate to help him out with any questions he has.
Adam’s work support network has been critical to his experience and the company culture has really proven that his remote internship experience could be just as good (if not better) than an in person experience.
What are you takeaways from this experience?
Overall, the entire internship has been one heck of an experience. The whole thing of being able to work on the entire tech stack of the product, anywhere from backend to frontend and some infrastructure too, has opened his eyes to a few things.
The importance of school when working in industry
When you’re in school, it can feel like the be-all end-all when you get a 60% on your assessments (or the happiest moments depending on how hard it was). That isn’t the case in the field.
The work you do in industry can sometimes be completely different than what you learned in class. You may have learned how to do triple integrals in calculus but did you learn how to make a React components and launch applications on AWS? They’re completely unrelated, yet the underlying transferrable lesson here is that you will need to learn these topics when given problems that are outside of your scope of knowledge.
The point of school isn’t to knock you down with every assignment or assessment but to teach you how to learn (and quickly at that). It gives you the ability to adapt and grow quickly depending on the demands of your job.
Overcoming “Imposter Syndrome”
Before an internship, it is easy to feel something called “imposter syndrome”. Imposter syndrome is described to be the feeling around self doubt (especially in your abilities) or feeling like a fraud. Especially for those who struggle in school, this is more apparent as these individuals are constantly comparing themselves against others. It is easy to feel like “your knowledge just won’t cut it” in the field.
This feeling is quickly overcome once you begin to work. You begin to see how much you know, how fast you can learn, and how little everyone else knows. You start contributing to a code base using a new technology and you gain confidence in your abilities once again. You begin to see that these experts still need to do some (or a lot) of Googling just to answer your question. You even work with your coworkers on difficult problems, both getting frustrated as you can’t figure out the solution.
Over time, you begin to realize that you are a smart and capable individual, one who can solve some problems and struggles with others too. This is okay because nobody has the answer to everything and you are growing as an individual along the way.
Final thoughts
Overall, Adam’s internship experience has been great. He has gained experience in something that they don’t cover in class and has learned more during this internship about the tech industry than school has covered in over 3 years.
Looking back, taking a remote internship was the right decision. It has been filled with ups and downs but overall it was a great experience. He got industry experience, grew his network, and help paying off tuition too. Also, the freedom and flexibility that comes with it meant more time to enjoy your life.
There’s one thing he has left to tell you: don’t be afraid of taking chances and putting yourself out there. The leap is the hardest part, it only gets better from there.
Thank you for reading 🎉
If you’d like to be featured in our Atypical Internship series, send us a message! 💡
