Joanna Folk talks life as a summer CodeLabs intern
COVID-19 disrupted the lives of college students in many ways. One especially troublesome consequence of the global pandemic? Canceled summer internships. Enter CodeLabs, CodeDay’s 100% online tech internship program, which stepped up to provide college students with opportunities for an alternative internship experience.
Several Software Development students from Green River College placed into a summer CodeLabs internship, among them, third-year applied baccalaureate student Joanna Folk. In the Q and A below, Folk talks about her CodeLabs experience, describes a PetID Machine Learning project her team worked on, and offers practical careers tips for college students.
First thing’s first. What led you to Green River College’s Software Development program?
JOANNA: Milling around a bunch of low-wage jobs has been an interesting experience. I’ve gained a lot of great friends and good stories but caring for myself has been a struggle financially. My health failed, and the safety net just wasn’t there. Oddly enough, I received an email from Green River. I took it as a sign and gave it a go. I was completely green going in. I hadn’t been in a classroom in over ten years.
I was walking around the campus parking lot one day, unaware of its layout and absolutely lost, when I ran into Marsha Medgard of the Workforce Education office. Marsha brought me into her office, and we talked over some things. I called up my girlfriend, Eleanor, and she came up to see Marsha. By the end of that week we both were on track to getting our Bachelor’s. Which, prior to that point, I had no awareness was even offered at Green River. This has been a life changing series of events. I tell everyone, even total strangers, as an attempt to get them to join me. You don’t have to keep struggling. There are other doors out there and Green River is one of them. Let’s do this together!
How did you first learn about opportunities at CodeLabs?
JOANNA: My fantastic instructor Ken Hang passed on the word about CodeLabs. Eleanor and I met him when we started a Women in Technology meetup. I loved the fact that he was from the DMV area (DC, MD, VA) like me. I took my first class with him last quarter, during Covid. Prior to that, I am not sure if he ever taught anyone online, and my own experiences with online classes were pretty thin. In my eyes, he is the epitome of what an instructor can be during a crisis. He constantly checked in with us as the classes went on. He managed to cultivate a feeling of community in a classroom with a single smiling face. I cannot say enough about this man, I really look up to him.
Prior to that, I had another internship lined up. To be honest, it started to feel as if I was walking on uneven ground. I decided to leave it and felt as if I were in shallow water for this summer. I got fortunate though and was picked as one of the CodeLab interns for 2020. They sent out a series of projects, split between advanced and beginner tracks. I had been accidentally placed on the advanced track, although by this point I had little under a year of coding experience. I talked with them about getting myself bumped down but ended up staying on the advance track. It was a fantastic experience! I learned a lot and not just through the project I completed but the variety of resources and talks they had. I’ve since connected with a slew of intelligent and kind individuals.
During your CodeLabs internship, did you work as part of a team? What kind of projects did you work on?
JOANNA: I worked on a team. We called ourselves Team (A and J) because we were two individuals with names that started with “A” and two individuals whose names started with “J”. My group mates were Amna Shahid and Jessica Chan, and our mentor was Apaar Sinha. I could not have asked for a better team. I have such a deep respect for each of them. Even better, we were always laughing and having fun. I loved that about this whole experience. I don’t think I ever stopped learning or laughing for the entire duration of it.
Apaar set the goals early: Train a model that can identify all 37 breeds of cats and dogs, create a web application that users can interface with, and retool our model using feature engineering to increase accuracy. We successfully reached every goal we set to make, hitting every weekly marker for progress as we went.
We trained our model using the fast.ai library and the ResNet34/50 models. We sourced our data from the Oxford-IIIT Pet dataset and performed our calculations, graphic and training via the Google Colab platform. As our data was exclusively images, we trained our learner via a convolutional neural network, and did so in lightning speed of a minute thirty per epoch (cycling over seven thousand images).
We then exported our trained model to a web application which we deployed to Render, allowing users to identify their own images of cats and dogs. After some small tweaks, using feature engineering, we got our model up to 96% accurate. Which we saw as akin to typical human error.
Was was it like working a virtual internship?
JOANNA: It was completely remote. Founder Tyler Menezes noted that CodeLabs has been online exclusively since 2013. I also decided to re-take back my health this summer. I was hiking every single day of CodeLabs. My team graciously allowed me to plan our meetings around my hikes. We never had any issues, even being three hours apart from one another. It would be interesting having those “aha” moments and wanting to reach out to my teammates then realizing they were eating or sleeping. I would leave a bunch of chatter in Slack, and the next morning, I’d wake up to their responses. Time-zones are funny!
The people at CodeLabs also graciously worked with me while I carted to and from mountain side. They allowed dialing in to all their Zoom meetings, and any of their videos we’d sync up (approximately) so we could talk about them afterwards. I felt like a part of the community (still do), even though I wasn’t always sitting in front of a computer. Which was really nice.
What were some major learning takeaways from your CodeLabs experience?
JOANNA: You can do this! I can do this! Anyone can do this! There are so many things you can learn and the technology field is a never-ending expanse of interesting information, projects and careers!
Don’t sell yourself short. I sold myself short. I tried to jump from the advanced track downwards. If I had, I would have never been a part of my wonderful team. I could have potentially never learned anything about Machine Learning. I really think it’s a stepping stone for future technology, and I am glad that I got to break off a piece of that grand picture.
Outside of that, I learned a whole slew of advice from individuals of many different backgrounds, which I really took to heart. If you want to hear some, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to share!
Learn more about Green River College’s Bachelor of Applied Science in Software Development by visiting www.greenriver.edu/software
Learn more about internship opportunities at CodeLabs by visiting https://labs.codeday.org/
