An Internship Unlike Any Other
My name is Lincoln Briscoe, a 21 year old student studying software engineering at Monash University who didn’t think he’d be getting a proper career level job until at least the end of 2023. But here I am, about to start working part time at carsales as a Junior Software Engineer after a 6 month internship with a Monash run program.
But how exactly did that internship go? Why was I lucky enough to get hired right afterwards? Well, from what I have heard from other students getting internships at other places, this one at carsales was a lot harder.
First of all, when I started this internship the only real experience I had with programming was what I had learned at Monash. A bit of Java here, a bit of Python over there, but nothing had prepared me well enough for the tools and systems I would have to use at carsales.
A lot of what I had heard from other students was about how little they were actually doing. It was mainly either small fixes, minor tasks or no important tasks at all. In fact, one friend I had talked with said they spent most of their time playing video games because the tasks were so simple. Not here though, at carsales I was working harder than I ever had before with the tasks they were setting me.
I worked in the Search Team, who are responsible for maintaining and building 1search. An entirely carsales built tool that is a faceted search engine that would one day be a product available to the public to use for their own websites. There are a lot of benefits to using 1search over a normal search engine and I would come to discover and learn these benefits over time. The main point is that because 1search is created by carsales, similar to how Unreal Engine 4 is created by Epic Games, you can’t just search up how to fix a bug within the system because no one else except for people at that company have worked on it, meaning websites like stack overflow become semi-useless. I wasn’t going to just be improving my programming skills while at carsales, I would also be undergoing important personal mindset changes and improving my ability to research so that I could fix these problems and add features to 1search.
The whole idea of researching before I begin a task was new to me. Previously I had been working at McDonalds for about 6 years and had drilled into my mind that getting work done fast was the most important thing. This is because you would be constantly pushing out orders as fast as possible, and that starting to attempt to do the work will produce the correct result faster than slowly taking my time to research. The problem with this approach was that I wasn’t actually learning anything deeper than what was actually required for that task, and if something slightly different came up in the future, I would not be performing the task any faster than the first time. It also had a negative effect on my thought process, a lot of the time I was left thinking if I was actually cut out for the job, if I could actually complete any of the tasks set for me properly. I was in desperate need of this change not only for my quality of work to improve, but my own self confidence as well.
This important mindset change came a little later into my internship than I would have liked, taking effect around the halfway mark as I was working on writing documentation for 1search. However, once the change did happen I could immediately see the positive effect it was having on my work. I was no longer just writing about 1search, I was now learning about 1search, performing my own tests on data in my own playground and actually understanding what each part did. Once I saw this happening, a wave of happiness and relief washed over me as I figured out why I was told to “Google it” every time I asked a question in the beginning of my internship. The team were trying to get me to follow this research mindset and actually learn the systems and tools I was using in my tasks so that in the future it would take less time for me to pick them back up.
Over the course of the six months I was at carsales, I learned more than I ever had at university, and the speed at which I learned this things was incredible. I had never touched anything like Angular or AWS before, but this newly found research ability helped me to learn the ins and outs of those systems incredibly quickly. Making the tasks that seem almost impossible, a little bit more possible. Now the tasks I was being given still weren’t the easiest of tasks, but they were challenging enough so that I always felt like I was improving. I was told that I was being treated like a junior and not an intern, as they were preparing to keep me permanently, I could definitely see the difference between the intern and the junior.
Overall, my entire experience at carsales has been invaluable for my growth and software engineering skills, I have learnt so much from the tasks I was given and each and every one of them felt like it was important to my development in some way. I never felt like I was doing a basic task and everything felt critical in some way.
