Work

Teaching built a habit of explaining everything as if the listener is a beginner, and pushed me to get creative with abstract topics, especially in Data Structures and Algorithms.

Teaching out loud also forced me to finally understand concepts that didn't stick when I was a student myself, because you can't teach something you don't understand.

It also made me put my tech skills to use in real life. Mingming, my Discord registration bot, was the first time I asked, "what can I make to fix a problem I'm personally facing?"

This is where I really learned Figma and learned to think through the user's eyes. Can a near-sighted, non-techy grandma use this app? Is this instruction easy to understand? Do these colors clash? Is this the shortest path to get the task done?

Now I can't stop evaluating the technology around me: apps, websites, even the ID scanners at school entrances. How often do they error? Could this process be simpler?

Our curriculum focused more on Python, though we were also taught C# and C++. This internship was my introduction to Java, and it made me realize that being exposed to different programming languages makes learning new things in computing a lot less intimidating.

When I started college, everything was overwhelming and abstract. But as you learn a lot (a lot, A LOT) of things, you realize many concepts build on top of each other or carry over. Programming languages mostly do the same things, just with different words and symbols. To display something in Python, you write print("hi"). In Java, you write System.out.println("hi");.

You also realize different languages exist for different purposes. Python is great for math and analytics, and it's versatile and easy to learn because it reads almost like English. Java runs a lot of the apps and systems we use every day, like Netflix, banking systems, and Android apps.

This internship gave me my "aha!" moment about programming languages, something I'd struggled to wrap my head around as someone who wasn't tech-savvy (at least not in the programmer way) going into Computer Science.

I was having a bit of an existential crisis: I didn't want to be "just an academic nut" and I worried about surviving the real world. So I applied for an actual job at school and landed in the admissions office.

It was my first real workplace. Even though it was my own school, I worked with actual hired colleagues, had real responsibilities, and got paid to do the work. Outside the controlled academic setting, I had to deal with people beyond my classmates and family: strangers I was responsible for serving as part of my job.

I talked with people from all walks of life and learned to adjust my language, wording, and tone to whoever was in front of me: Bisaya, Tagalog, or English. I also used a real information management system for the first time and thought, "oh, so the databases in my lectures turn into this? Cool."