This year was the 4th time in a row when we implemented an internship program. We are glad we had four enthusiastic students who crossed a challenging journey into the depths of programming. Based on the partnerships we have with the Technical University from Cluj-Napoca and with Babes- Bolyai University, every year students have the chance to know about the internship programs we organize and to apply for one of the paid places. Over 6 weeks of intensive teamwork, 4 bright young minds were engaged in learning new .NET and Java skills. Sorina Trinca, Radu Socaci, Cosmin Dascalu and Peter Lorincz are the 4 students who learned a lot of new concepts related to the technologies used, coding standards, versioning, and improved the knowledge they already knew or heard of. They had the opportunity to apply what they learned during the theoretical training, but also to put in practice the pieces of knowledge formed in university. Their dedication, hard work and perspicacity were confirmed within the final demos, leading to the idea that the entire experience was successful. They aimed to reach the projects’ goals being helped by mentors, who constantly encouraged and coordinated them. Being eager to spread their own experience, Andreea Mitrica, Cristian Groza and Zoli Banhidi were very dedicated and helpful, creating a convenient environment for students to also put in practice what they learned at university. The internship program is based on two parts. The first one refers to a training period, which is used to offer the students all the knowledge and patterns they need to facilitate their future application. The second part is developing the greenfield web application, coordinated by the mentors. This year they created two different web apps, a monitoring and a socializing one, both of the following to be launched soon.
We wanted to know what the internship meant for Radu, who is getting close to finishing the studies at Technical University: ”They provide a bridge between the college(theory-based) and the industry. Internships also stimulate students to learn new skills or dive deeper into some previously learned concepts. “ Peter, currently studying Computer Science at Babes-Bolyai University, was one of the students who was guided by our team to develop or design code. Peter explains to us what he liked during the internship at COERA: “I think one of the most important skills I learned at COERA was working in a team. I also learned a lot about the Spring and Angular frameworks and presenting our project at the end helped me sharpen my skills of free talking in front of a public .”
Therefore, this experience talks about how important is to apply some information you know about practical projects, developing your knowledge and helping you understand the concepts. Also, the project’s presentation marks another important key to develop some social values. For the future professional life, the mentors encourage them to have patience when developing and designing software or components, to be open to learn and try new things and most importantly, to challenge the solutions and not stick to the first working one. We are happy that three of them are currently part of the team, with a part-time schedule, in order to facilitate their school engagement.
