An Inside Look at Red Hat’s Boston Internship Program with Grace Colbert, Senior Technology Intern at Red Hat
By Fiona Whittington
Grace Colbert is not your average senior technology intern at Red Hat, a multinational software company. A graphic design student at Boston University, she works on a broad range of projects helping to solve design challenges for both Red Hat and the open source community.
“While not having a specific team to work with has its downfalls, it also has given me a greater variety of projects that I work on. This is good for me because I like to switch it up often,” she said. “For example, I do internal facing design projects that only Red Hat people can utilize and external projects like creating promotional materials for the Red Hat community.”
So far, Grace’s favorite project to work on has been a projects worked on by the Red Hat interns called Collaborate by Code. The goal of the project is to create a web application that enables users to contribute processing code via social media or a quiz to produce objects on a shared canvas. Each object is unique to the user’s affiliation with Red Hat to create a visualization that reflects the diversity of individuals within the Red Hat community.
When finished the application will run on a large screen that spans both the 3rd and 4th floor in the epicenter of Red Hat’s Executive Briefing Center.
“The project started with an idea to make one of the screens in the EBC environment more interactive. Right now, the screen has an animation on it, which allows limited interaction. Our goal is to make the whole experience more engaging so that you’re creating and coding the animations you see on the screen.”
One of the biggest challenges Grace has faced during her internship has been working with developers to understand the design constraints of various technologies. To overcome this challenge, Grace talks to developers regularly to familiarize herself with technical jargon.
“You don’t have to have an enormous technical background, but you do have to have some willingness to learn about technical skills,” she explains.
For non-technical students looking for a design position at Red Hat, Grace recommends working on your design thinking skills. “You need to know how to think like a designer, how to approach problems, and how to try different methods that might just solve issues in a unique way.”
Overall, Grace has enjoyed working at Red Hat and exploring life outside the Boston University bubble. She cites Red Hat’s open and collaborative culture as the catalyst for her positive internship experience.
“Whereas previous internships have been useful and enjoyable, it was always about what needs to get done. However, internships at Red Hat are about what you are interested in learning about, what are you trying to get out of this experience, what kind of design you are interested in — which makes a huge difference in my experience, how much I enjoy my job, and how much you feel like a part of the community.”
If you want to continue the conversation with Grace, feel free to contact her at gcolbert@redhat.com. Hipster alert — her favorite coffee conversation topics range from art to craft beer.
