Summer internship 2019
This summer, on July 15, under the roof of our office, a team of 20 individuals embarked on a common journey and worked towards making others’ (train) journey a little more pleasant. Funnily enough, they didn’t know this at the time. Only we did.
It begun with us having an awesome experience during our last internship. So we decided to repeat that, have a bunch of cool kids in our office, teaching them how to make their first mobile app and showing them what teamwork really means. For this, all we were still missing were passionate interns. So we went out to get them.
Well, sort of. We quickly got down to business, threw a few ideas around, combined some “Haha” with an “Aha” and made a humorous internship campaign that speaks their language.
This poster is only one of the many elements of the campaign. GIFs, videos, flyers, banners and personal conversations were all part of the gig, stirring the interest of almost 1k applicants (wow) from which we selected 20 very talented individuals for our summer internship.
Now that you have the context, we can go back to my intro phase: July 15, Halcyon Mobile office, 20 interns, 1 project. It’s time I tell you more about the latter.
Each year we try to mould the lessons we teach our interns into useful products. There were parcel delivery, time management and interview apps we created with them over the years. This time, we thought we’d embrace a project that serves an online solution to an offline problem many of us encountered when traveling by train.
Cluj is a wonderful city populated, amongst many, by students from all over the country and flooded by youngsters for festivals, so its train station turns into bee hives every once in awhile. Apart from a few prepared ones who buy their tickets online, everybody seems to step on someone’s toes wishing the misery of planning a trip, finding the right train that leaves at the right time, buying and validating the tickets would go away. We thought, solving these issues through an app would be a wonderful first ride and a common journey for our interns, not to mention a decent analogy for this article.
Thus, for 6 weeks, under the guidance of their mentors our Backend, iOS and Android interns learned and practiced so much they managed to finish the project and present us with a working prototype of the app that could simplify public railway transportation in Romania.
The time they spent with us was as fun as intense. We made sure their learning experience is flickered with game nights, leisure and team building activities inside and outside the office.
From the look of it, they had a good time with us, but we’d rather let them paint you a more authentic picture of their experience.
All in all, we had a successful summer internship and managed to have yet another awesome experience. Our team and our interns have all chipped in to make this possible, and for this we’re especially grateful. Topping this will definitely be a challenge, but we learned a lot, laughed a lot and we’re ready to do it again…next year!
Originally published at https://halcyonmobile.com on August 28, 2019.
