My Internship Experience at Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs
One of the key experiences during college time is a corporate internship. Gaining hands-on work experience is vital for boosting your resume as well as the stepping stone into the real world. Nervous jitters now and then, excitement at its peak, calling up my batchmates, and taking a look at the checklist of onboarding documents a hundred times — this more or less describes the morning of the first day of my internship interviews. It all started when amidst a sea of deadlines and assignments, companies started lining up at my college to hire summer interns. After a scrutinising interview, I was hired as a Software Developer Intern at Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs.
Right from the onset of my internship, which commenced with a smooth onboarding process, the HR department introduced us to the Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs family. They showed us that Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs is a place where exceptional minds and motivated teams worked hand in glove to build products that will change the way Telekom operates. We were given an overview of the products, i.e. OneShop, OneTV and Home Gateway and the amazing feats they had achieved. Their jargons confused me profoundly and left me in awe but I was very enthusiastic and eager to be learning something new. When the senior management gave us an introduction to their products, I was awestruck with the amount of work they had done in such a span of time. By the end of the first week, it was clear that I was surrounded by incredibly talented professionals who worked efficiently towards developing solutions which have real impacts on users.
After the introduction week, we were divided into teams and introduced to our mentors. I had no idea what that new world had in store for me but I was looking forward to it. We were given a Bootcamp project to familiarize ourselves with the tech stack used at Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs and to gain an insight into how developers approach real-life problems and work in teams towards developing solutions from scratch. The problem statement projected to us heightened our inquisitiveness and reassured us that these following two months of our lives would only be interesting but extremely challenging. I feel that every day was different there as I got a chance to work with some of the industry’s best talent on these compelling innovations & create fantastic customer experiences day in day out.
My team of Interns included Saumya, Neeraj from IIIT Allahabad, Jigyaasu, Yash, Somil, Sabeel from NSIT and Reeshabh, Kushagr, Lakshaya, Shreeparna, Ayush from IIIT Delhi. All of us helped each excel and challenged each other to bring the best out of us. As Neeraj said, It all seemed a bit overwhelming in the beginning because of course building something from scratch is a challenging task, but with the continuous guidance from our mentors, we crossed big hurdles and came out victorious.
After a few weeks, we started to get the essence of things. All our colleagues were very approachable and whenever we struggled with something we had tons of help from both mentors, buddies and fellow interns. Starting from designing the architecture, sequence diagrams to their final implementation, at every point, we had to keep in mind the scalability, software quality, technology stack used and its importance. We had to make sure that we think from the user’s point of view and develop solutions that would solve problems faced by our customer base. Our mentors introduced us to the latest technology stack used in the IT industry like spring-boot, MongoDb, SQL, API calls and a lot more. We had standup meetings every morning where we would discuss the work completed by us the day before and talk about the work to be done the following day. This gave us a chance to see what issues others were working on and an idea for us to present the team with some problems if we faced any. We had meetings with our mentors every day to discuss upon the deliverables completed and milestones to be achieved. Rishabh and I were talking about this one day that we expected a formal environment here; instead, everyone from our MD to all the other team members were very cool and supportive.
“The meetings were virtual, but the experience and knowledge gained from them were real”- Shreeparna.
The problem statements that we were given involved the development of solutions to real-life problems for our entire customer base. Our project aimed to integrate the OneTV app of DTDL to include the meta content enrichment service, which helps facilitate us to provide details regarding a particular movie or TV Show to our end-users. It will help provide them with the necessary information and enable our users to filter their favourite genre of movie, their choice for a director or actors and also present them with a few critics and public reviews to help them in making an informed judgment. Subsequently, based on their real experience and reviews, our company would stand to gain credibility and increase its viewership. Using spring boot as a tech stack for the backend, we build a metadata API microservice. This is used to present the Content Management Service(CMS) frontend with the concatenated meta information from varied sources. This lightweight model will make use of another microservice with the capability to ingest data from the open movie database(OMDb) API and scrap the Internet Movie Database(IMDb) website for user reviews to build our meta store on MongoDb. We integrated our metadata API module to call the database for information and display it on the CMS Frontend where the Admin would approve it. After approval, this data will be visible to our end users through the OneTv app.
DTDL family considered us as their most valued assets; they thought of us as their future and welcomed us with a strong culture of constant feedback & open communication. This culturally diverse workforce not only helped us build and manage our strengths but simultaneously ensured that we enhance our learning curve through well-rounded learning and development opportunities.
The People Team’s constant support, guidance as well as the fun sessions they organised were essential for our development and extremely helpful in instilling in us a sense of belongingness. Everybody I talked to was always ready to address any of my doubts and was full of insights and energy. This made me enthusiastic and increased my curiosity about technology. I never expected to learn so much in such a short span yet with the consistent guidance that was bestowed helped us learn and grow along the way. We saw through the journey of a product from the requirements phase to its deployment. A few of the most important things that we all would carry with us include teamwork and collaborations, support and encouragement towards our fellow colleagues. We feel fortunate to have been given this opportunity and hope that we made the best of it. The DTDL family helped us, interns, coming from diverse backgrounds to work together and collaborate towards contributing to the real-world app and solving problems faced by our end-user customers. These two months have given us an insight into the IT industry and a feel of how the real world works.
It familiarized us with how an app begins from an idea, goes through months of work to finally land into its current mould.
I can not even begin to describe the exposure and learning this internship has provided us with and I express my gratitude to the DTDL family for providing me with an experience to cherish.
