GIP during COVID-19 — An Unforgettable Experience.
Hi, I’m Jinge from China and studying in Japan at the moment. Back in February, I was looking for companies in Tokyo that offered software development internships in English. It definitely wasn’t easy, but luckily, I found HENNGE and its Global Internship Program.
In the beginning, before my search for internships, I had no idea about HENNGE. When I discovered the company, the first thing I did was read the blog posts written by past interns to see what their experience was like. Most of the past interns were from countries other than Japan, which meant not only were they interning, they were also exploring the Japanese culture through the internship. What caught my attention was that in all the intern stories, the CEO of the company, Ogura san was wearing a kimono and shaking hands with each intern for a photo. I found that interesting and I was very curious about the company and finally decided to give it a try.
After completing my coding challenge, I had an interview with the engineers and after I was received an email saying I had passed, I finally start my exciting journey at HENNGE!
The Start:
The company values communication, so the entire office is an open space (free seating), and there are lots of events that promote communication such as the GIP lunch for the interns to get to know the members at HENNGE, Board-Game Night (every Wednesday), Monthly Technical Session (MTS), and these events provide free meal!
On the first day, I met with other interns and set up our Mac(latest Macbook pro model) provided by the company during the internship period, and we had our first newcomers dinner together.
Assignments:
There were three parts, the first part was for full-stack development training, in order to make sure everyone knew the basics. I found this task emphasized more on the backend side, but don’t worry if you are not familiar with it, you have enough time to learn as you go and interns can actually help each other since we share the same task. The second part was a DevOps training. We had the chance to use AWS and deploy our application developed in the first part. Whenever I had an unsolvable problem, I always asked other interns or mentors for help(we were all in a group chat), and thanks to their kindness and open discussion environment, I was able to solve the problem and learned a lot.
After finishing two assignments, the engineering team believed that we had acquired enough skills to solve some real-life engineering problems, so we were assigned to different teams to work on different tasks under our respective mentors’ guidance.
GIP Lunches:
Before we started working from home (during the earlier stages of the pandemic), we had GIP lunches with other HENNGE every week. Since HENNGE’s office is located in Shibuya, a major commercial and business center of Tokyo, it was never hard to find delicious food, but that created another problem: what to eat? There were simply too many places to choose from 🍲 🍥 🍣 🍱 🍛 🍙 🍚. Luckily, smart HENNGE engineers built an internal website that recommended restaurants around the area and allowed the user to ask the system to pick one at random- which definitely saved us many times!!😂
Work From Home (WFH):
Tokyo in March is supposed to be a warm season when the Sakura (cherry blossoms)🌸 bloom, but we didn’t expect it to snow when we started our WFH right away. This rare event when the sakura outside meets with the snow, felt like a magical moment and a consolation for us who were about to start our WFH.
As COVID-19 started to spread in Japan, we had to stay and worked from home. It was the first time for me to work remotely, and I guess it was also the first time for HENNGE to run GIP virtually. Although we couldn’t meet each other and interact physically, the GTM team and mentors took care of us very well. We continued our GIP Lunches virtually and the members frequently check whether we needed any help. A pity for me that I couldn't take a photo shaking hands with the CEO Ogura san wearing a kimono and use it for my story.
Lastly, I am very grateful for GTM team members who talked with me many times and asked how was my remote intern life was, because they knew we were staying home all day and could be feeling lonely, especially those interns who had flown in all the way from other countries. The GTM team tried their best to make us feel comfortable in this hard situation.
Overall, I would say even it is WFH, the experience and quality of this program remains great.
Monthly Technical Session (MTS)
MTS was held on our final intern day. Every intern is expected to present for around 15 minutes(10 minutes presentation and 5 minutes Q&A). Even the CEO Ogura san attended the MTS and asked some questions (he is a hacker). What I felt from MTS was that HENNGE has a very good engineer culture and atmosphere of sharing new technology.
and then we received internship certification while practicing social distancing😂
The End?
I would like to recommend this program to anyone who wants to visit Japan and considers working in Japan as a Software Engineer. HENNGE has been running this program for many years and they have designed and evolved very well to make sure you have the best experience internship here. Please apply for it without any hesitation!
