How I Got an Internship Position at a Zambian Tech Hub (BongoHive)
It all started on a Saturday morning, July 6, 2018 in Kitwe. It was a Developer Circles (DevC) meetup at The Copperbelt University (CBU) dubbed DevX. Being the lead of a student developer community at the institution[CBU], I was excited to host DevX and so was my team. The meetup introduced cool tech concepts that changed my view of programming 🤔. After the meetup, I got to interact with speakers among them, Mbuyu, DevC Lusaka Lead. Mbuyu was then an employee at BongoHive and told me about amazing things they built. I got inspired and hoped would work at a hub like that one.
When school closed, I had a chance to attend my second DevC meetup. This time, it was in Lusaka and guess what? It was at BongoHive. The meetup introduced React and I came out of the meetup confused. This could have been because I only knew basics of HTML, CSS and Vanilla JavaScript and thought those were enough for web development. Nonetheless, the leads were kind enough to share resources about React.
On April 5, 2019, my institution was closed indefinitely by the relevant authority on account of student unrest. I went home feeling disturbed because I really needed to complete my studies. The following month, I saw a BongoHive ad on one of my social media accounts. And yes! 😊, they were hiring software developer interns and I did not hesitate to tap the ‘apply’ link. Surprising the link redirected to a GitHub repository with a React coding challenge 😭. Lucky enough, the challenge had learning materials and challenges at the end. I worked on the challenge tirelessly and managed to submit before the deadline.
After a couple of days of waiting for feedback, I received an email indicating that I had been shortlisted to attend a hackathon from which they would pick the successful candidates. Although the hackathon was challenging, I found it fun and a good experience working in a team.
The big day came, I received an email that I made it to the Internship programme 😃 together with 5 others out of about 57 applicants. I was excited and this to me was a dream come true. So far from the programme, I have learnt UI/UX design, some project management tools, getting requirement specifications right among other things. I look forward to learning more.
Thank you for reading 🙏.
