My Internship Experience: Youth Radio Interactive
The specific skills I used included many things: Teamwork, Problem Solving, Patience, Consistency, and Communication. My daily duties included working from 4:15 to 6:30 every single Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from April 4th to June 17th. I did not go in on holidays such as Spring Break and Memorial Day. I would check in with the rest of the teens and staff at the Youth Radio Interactive (YRI) Branch (depending on who was there that day), usually talking to Asha, my main supervisor along with two other staff members named Storm and Jocelyn. Our branch was split into two groups: YRI 1, which was me and 1 to 2 other people who had a main goal to create and finish an android application that could possibly be put on the Google store, and YRI 2, the more advanced group which pursued more advanced means of coding involving HTML, CSS and working to officially release their own application on the Google store. I only saw YRI 2 on fridays, and I checked in with whoever was there each work day depending on what day it was. Every other Friday, I filled out a timesheet with notes and listed my working hours for my pay that I would receive as a paycheck the following friday. In the session I learned how to work doing a number of things for my Application: Market Research (where I looked up applications that had a similar goal to ours such as safety apps and analyzed them), User Research (where I used google forms and analyzed respondents’ data to our carefully curated questions), How to code in App Inventor (by putting coding blocks together such as “if ‘Button#1’ clicked, make ‘Label#1.text’ invisible”), The basics of CSS and HTML (by learning how to code text, photos, links, and colors into a webpage), and how to make a good looking Application design in Photoshop (keeping pages consistent, repetative, similar, good color mix with contrasting colors,). An obstacle during this Internship would definitely be understanding the function that would take place when connecting different blocks together in App Inventor, especially ‘If Statements’, or in other words, understanding what was really going on when you were creating these lines of code: what they did, what they meant. My initial expectation was to code for not only a majority or the session, but almost all of the time using coding languages such as C++, HTML and CSS. Instead, I spent a lot of time thinking of developing an application and (with the right resources) fully preparing myself for creating the application with the layout of everything in my mind. Asha asked very important questions such as “What will this button do?”, “What kind of application is this?”, “What does your application need and what can be taken out?”, and finally, what I think was the most important question, “What is the goal of your application?” Also, the HTML and CSS learning was condensed into a 1-week period over 3 work days, which felt fast and abrupt (which disappointed me a bit), but I still learned a good chunk of the basics of the two languages from it. With the pay being a gratuitous aspect of the work experience, I learned a wealth of coding knowledge and proper work etiquette, or in other words, what it’s like to be in the work force and knowing my boundaries and the reality of consequences in a real job. Reflecting on my internship, there’s a lot I have really learned. I now have an idea of what a job in the workforce looks like and feels like, but still keeping in mind that an internship is quite different (and usually easier) compared to a job. It allowed me to gather new experiences and think about what a real job would look like and the actions it would include. There are things like social connections, charisma, experience in the job field, focus, honesty, how to treat a boss, requirements, consistent chores (wearing a t-shirt), being focused when you’re on-the-clock, working specific hours consistently day-to-day and week-to-week, and team-building through connecting to your co-workers (I think this one’s really powerful, as it can seriously positively influence your work ethics and flow). My newfound knowledge of programming with AppInventor, a little bit of HTML, CSS and graphic design will benefit me greatly in the job market as it has allowed me to develop a small foundation for the world of programming, code and graphic design. I am really grateful that I could have the ability to not only be paid for this internship, but learn from this fun, interactive and powerful experience.
Youth Radio Interactive: Internship Logs
Week 1
April 4-8, 2016
For the first week, I’ve been starting by filling out forms, not really doing anything yet. Doing a Rockman Et Al form.
Week 2
April 11-15, 2016
I assumed that I would be coding for a majority of the time. But instead I won’t be coding until about week 8. I’ve met the people in my internship and we are brainstorming application ideas by thinking of an app and writing down what the front of the app would look like.
Week 3
April 18-22, 2016
One of the people left our group, we still haven’t started to code the application, probably won’t be starting for a while. We’re still brainstorming application ideas. Me and a partner are going to make an app together, so we chose their application idea and we’re going to work on it together.
Week 4
April 25-29, 2016
We started thinking of the functions a cell phone uses, such as a clock, accelerometer, GPS, bluetooth, Wifi, the list goes on and on. We talked about what phone functionality our application will use, probably GPS and clock.
Week 5
May 2-6, 2016
We’re starting to code the application, learning about the program we’re going to work with called App Inventor, designed by people at MIT.
Week 6
May 13, 2016
We started to learn more about the different functions in App Inventor, the visible controllers and the invisible controllers that would show up when designing the look of the app: GPS, clock. We also learn that the coding for the application is done by blocks.
Week 7
May 16-20, 2016
We learned about “if statements” and how to make them in App Inventor.
Week 8
May 23-27, 2016
We started going into html coding. We made our own html markup page. We even ran it through a server that our supervisor set up using filezilla. We learned how to put in links, text, headers, open and close different aspects of html with <> and </>.
Week 9
June 1-3, 2016
This week we worked more on the application and talked about variables and applied them to our coding. I’m designing the pages of our apps in photoshop to make them look pretty.
Week 10
June 6-10, 2016
We finished our app to the best we could, but couldn’t quite finish it. Celebrated the almost-end of the session with Boba Tea and talking about our accomplishments.
Week 11
June 13-17, 2016
We are coming to a close for our application. I’m working on my own to make a presentation and present the application Friday on this thing called ‘Demo Day” and show what our application can do.