An Insiders Perspective & Experience on Internships

If you're like most people, the word "internship" probably makes you think of coffee runs and getting stuck with the tedious work. But at Snapsheet, internships are everything but that! We believe in giving our interns meaningful work so they can learn,  grow, and leave their mark, all while having fun simultaneously.

Here's what one of our interns, Rutvik Pansare, had to say about his experience! 

What to Expect as an Intern at Snapsheet

Each company comes with its own culture and way of tackling problems. During my summer internship at Snapsheet, I got to work with people of different backgrounds and learned a lot about how the company puts its values into action.

I joined the customer-vendor management team, which develops the VICE frontend and backend repositories, and it was the best team I’ve ever worked with. The energy of the team gave me the impetus to do better. I was new to Ruby on Rails, which I had to pick up quickly. My manager, Carl, understood enough to give me time to get familiar with the technologies and start rocking and rolling the tasks!

Impacting Critical Software Processes & Functionality

At Snapsheet they treat their interns as full-time employees, and I witnessed this when the tasks assigned to me directly impacted the users of our products. Of course, performing these significant tasks was not without its challenges.

I was in charge of adding features such as Bulk Vendor import and export to the Bulk Uploads Page, while also making this page more user-friendly. Previously, admins had to manually set up vendor data using the Snapsheet app for a particular carrier, which would take weeks. After adding the import functionality, we could set up thousands of vendors in a few minutes. I felt accomplished knowing the feature I built saved our organization valuable time. 

Another thing that I admired about Snapsheet was its code review process. As software developers, we must be highly critical of the work we submit so that the user always has a positive experience. To ensure this, each team member has to get their work approved by several teammates before it is cleared. This not only helps improve the quality of the code we write but also allows for valuable feedback and addresses areas to improve upon. This process made me a more efficient programmer and helped me adopt better coding practices.

Collaboration Between Teams & Employees

All interns also had one-on-one sessions with managers from other departments where we could freely ask them questions about what they do. This gave me a completely different perspective on how teams operate here and what we can learn from them!

As I was handling the design aspects of the Snapsheet page, I was even involved with the product team. This was where Vallen and Jessica, two members of the product team, gave me deeper insights into our customers and their needs. Jessica, our  UI/UX designer with tremendous passion for her work and total clarity of what our users want, gave me valuable feedback on my designs and helped nurture my front-end design skills.

At the end of the summer, I got to present my work during the “Intern Lightning Talks”, where people from different teams got a chance to see what the other interns and I built during our internships. I am grateful that Snapsheet gave me this opportunity to develop my skills. I will continue to work on meaningful projects that help make people’s lives better.