My MAGICal Experiences — From a Mentee to a 4x Intern
When you were a MAGIC mentee, which grade were you in? What was the background of your mentor?
When I was a MAGIC mentee, I was in seventh grade at Challenger School, and my mentor was Venmathi Gunasekaran, a systems engineer at Medtronic.
What project did you do as a mentee? How did you select it?
I had learnt coding since kindergarten; however, I had never actually created a project outside of school before, so I built a simple website on GitHub using HTML/CSS/Js that taught math, science, and vocabulary on 3 different difficulty levels.
You also interned with MAGIC. Tell us about your experience.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted to gain real-world programming experience, so I requested the founder, Ira Pramanick, for a summer internship. Since I enjoyed the work, I continued interning every summer until freshman year of college, under the guidance of my new mentor, Smriti Pramanick. With her mentorship, I learned about how vast the world of computer science was; rather than believing that CS jobs revolved around sitting alone behind a screen for hours, I understood how collaborative and creative computer science truly is.
Specifically, my mentors have encouraged me to explore a lot of unfamiliar facets of computer science rather than simply sticking with web development, such as machine learning and databases. From preparing presentations to communicating with a larger team, MAGIC has taught me how to see a project through from start to finish.
What project did you do as an intern?
As an intern, my project was to work on a website that stored and displayed previous mentee projects. Then, this website was going to be published and made available to the general public, a task that the MAGIC board had a need for.
I started off by updating the UI of the website, specifically aligning the website’s color scheme with MAGIC’s brand guide and displaying mentee projects on the home page. Then, I created a password-protected form for mentees to upload their own projects, using firebase authentication for security. The information was saved in a text file and manually added to the website.
In my next term, I used the Firestore database to store project information that the mentee uploads. This way, the website can read and write to/from the database rather than manually inserting information to the website, thereby improving scalability and efficiency.
In my last 2 internship terms, the MAGIC board pushed to migrate all the information from Firestore to the Salesforce database, ensuring Salesforce is the source of truth for everything MAGIC related. At first, we used jsForce, a third party library, to communicate between the GitHub website and the salesforce database. Unfortunately, JSForce had limitations, since strings could be retrieved and displayed from the database. However, images could not be retrieved, due to error messages from CORB, a new security feature that regulates communication between different websites. Hence, we rewrote the code to host the website directly on Visualforce, Salesforce’s native framework, at https://testmagic.force.com.
What about that experience that you carried to college? How was it helpful?
With MAGIC, I learned the importance of creating proof-of-concept projects to ensure that the idea and execution is feasible; secondly, I learned how to effectively collaborate with others, eg, MAGIC board members. Understanding that there are different ways of approaching a solution to a problem, I’ve also learned to not be attached to my code; instead, I should be willing to discard old code if my team or I find a better alternative.
As a first year Computer Science student in UC San Diego, all these lessons about communication, organization, and problem solving have helped me tremendously, especially as I navigate creating projects with a team rather than alone.
What advice would you offer to mentees?
I feel that the biggest advantage that MAGIC gave me was the opportunity to form meaningful bonds with my mentors; hence, I would encourage all mentees to get to know their mentors past surface level. Getting to know my mentors’ interests beyond tech or work has encouraged me to explore other interests professionally, such as film or theater, which also have interdisciplinary applications in CS.
Additionally, during the final presentations, each mentee/intern has the opportunity to present their own projects, and I’ve always been inspired by the other mentee’s and intern’s projects, as their topics often inform my next project. Therefore, I think paying attention to your peers and learning from them is another advantage offered by MAGIC.
What do you think is next for you?
I’ve had the opportunity to attend a lot of final MAGIC presentations, which have illustrated how vast the world of CS is. Hence, in UCSD, I’m looking forward to learning more about unfamiliar CS concepts and becoming more knowledgable, so that I am able to relate concepts together and draw real-world connections. During these intern/mentee terms, MAGIC has also helped me develop my technical and soft skills, which I want to apply in college, as I begin searching for internships and jobs.
Finally, since my MAGIC mentors have given me the tools and confidence to simultaneously pursue a STEM career and artistic hobbies, I would love to eventually re-join MAGIC as a mentor after I have gained experience in the CS field. By mentoring, I’d hope to inspire someone else, like how my mentors have inspired me.
MAGIC is a nonprofit that aims to expose middle and high school girls to the MAGIC of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). MAGIC provides 1–1 mentoring, pairing the girls with women who have successful careers in STEM. With the guidance of their mentors, MAGIC girls develop projects of their own choosing and are given a judgment free learning space to experiment, make mistakes and gain confidence. Learn more at getmagic.org and reach out to the team at comments@getmagic.org
