The View On The Global Internship Program from a Local Person.
According to the HENNGE website, GIP is the most diverse and inclusive tech internship program in Japan. Although the internship is aimed globally, it’s also the best choice for people in Japan!
My name is Kenta. I live in and have grown up in Japan. I found out about GIP from a list of IT internship programs in Japan for foreigners even though I am Japanese. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to work with people from diverse backgrounds. I had a great time as I expected.
This article is the first article about the experience of a hybrid (remote and in-person) GIP intern.
Meet the diversity
The First Day
Luckily, I could go to the office on the first day since I live in Japan. At first, I was impressed with the clean and spacious office. Next, talking with powerful HENNGE members motivated me. Of course, the atmosphere really felt diverse, as I imagined. To be honest, I was quite exhausted on my first day from using English the whole day.
Meet diverse divisions
HENNGE GIP interns have a lot of chances to meet different teams and their members. It is not limited to the engineering team. I attended meetings with different divisions (from Sales to Customer Success) more than once every week. From every meeting, I learned about what HENNGE was doing and where HENNGE was going.
Monthly Technical Session (MTS)
IT engineers tend to like talking about technical things. HENNGE members are no exception. At the MTS, some engineers and all GIP participants presented technical talks regarding topics that were either of interest to them or piqued their curiosity. I had the opportunity to share about the work I did at my university. After my presentation, some members asked me questions. Thanks to the insightful questions, I enjoyed talking about my work.
HENNGE All-Hands!
At first, I was not sure what would happen at ‘HENNGE all-hands’. However, it turns out that HENNGE all-hands was an exciting experience for me. At the virtual event, the company reviewed its situation, reaffirmed what HENNGE is, and what HENNGE members are. I learned a lot about the culture of HENNGE at the event. If I had chosen a different GIP batch, I would not have been able to attend this quarterly event. I was so lucky.
Technical Assignments
Of course, GIP is a tech internship. I did a lot of engineering works and got feedbacks from skillful mentors. At first glance, the requirements for the assignments seem so hard to meet for me. But, the mentors’ advice and fine-grained problem setting enabled me to build a complicated web application from scratch. Moreover, solving each task guided my application to a scalable and portable one.
I worked on the assignments in a hybrid manner, which means working from home and at the office. Working from home is a good way to avoid the very, very busy Japanese commute. On the other hand, communicating at the office is also essential to improve working efficiency. HENNGE allowed me to choose my workplace. It’s very flexible, and I came to the office only when I needed to. Also, I will mention later; HENNGE makes a massive effort to make everyone feel comfortable working from home. So, if you cannot reach the office, you don’t need to worry about it.
Efforts for comfortable work from home
HENNGE provides a lot of things to work from home efficiently. For example, they encourage us to ask everything we don’t understand and talk with people who belong to different groups. This challenge is one of the most distinctive cultures of HENNGE, I think.
GIP Remote Lunch and fun-donut
Unfortunately, we were working remotely, and most members couldn't meet at the office. However, HENNGE was trying to bridge the gap between remote GIP and in-person GIP. GIP lunch and fun-donut are good examples that gave the interns more chances to talk with other members. GIP lunch happened in a zoom meeting room. We enjoyed talking about equipment in their rooms instead of eating meals at restaurants in Shibuya. At fun-donut, three people are picked randomly and we start talking about things that are not related to work at all. It was introduced after people started working from home. I think this is quite a lovely attempt.
Conclusion
Everyone can apply to GIP as it is really a global internship program. I think it’s an excellent opportunity for people who live outside of Japan and people living in Japan. This is the view of Global (Internship Program) from a local person.
Kenta Ishiguro is a PhD student at Keio University in Japan. He interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from May 17th to June 25th, 2021.
