The university internship is one of the most important periods in a student’s life. It is the moment when students can leave the uni and put their knowledge into practice.
I joined Arteries as a student for an 8-week internship in the summer of 2021. I was about to write a thesis and during the spring semester I got interested in smartphone software development. So I started looking for an internship in that direction and found Arteries Studio in the department’s list. I sent in my application, attached a rough CV and some references, and a few days later I got the feedback that I was welcome to join the internship.
On my first day, I met my future colleagues, my team leader and was given my first project. I was developing an Android app in parallel with my mentor, building screens one by one according to the design, while actively learning and using Git. I received feedback from my mentor after each completed feature, and he actively helped me develop alongside them. Towards the end of the internship, I finished the Android app and was given the new task of building this app in Flutter framework. I started to learn the Dart programming language and the Flutter toolkit, and I liked it so much that I started to work on my thesis project in Flutter.
During the 8 weeks I saw and learned so much about life at Arteries, and I was so impressed and sucked in that I decided to stay with them after university (and luckily they wanted me to). I liked the variety of projects, and therefore the project team, so I could always work with and learn from others. I also learnt a lot from my mentor, I could always rely on him if I needed help. I was a bit worried that the work would take up a lot of my energy, besides university and writing my thesis, but luckily I was surrounded by very understanding and supportive colleagues. They understood if I wasn’t always available because of university, and before exams they cheered me on and wished me well. The home office facility was also a great help to me during my studies.
It was also good to work alongside university because I was able to experience a lot of what was taught in theory. For example, the process of project management, the project lifecycle, version management with Git, the use of software development architectures, specification writing, design process, testing, all of which I was actively involved in and got to experience and understand myself.
Besides university, I had the opportunity to participate in several projects and get to know my colleagues better, learn to work together and communicate with them. Basically, everyone was open and kind to me, and anyone I approached was happy to take the time to help me.
My Master’s thesis topic was given to me by my company team leader, who was my personal consultant during the writing of the thesis. My topic was server-driven display architecture, which means that the mobile client receives the interface description files and the data to be displayed from the server, so that the display can be more flexible according to the needs. This architecture can be useful for e-commerce mobile applications, for example, as they are usually built from the same screens but their appearance is highly dependent on the products being sold. By building these screens with a server-driven architecture, we can better tailor them to the client’s needs, for example the main page. If the sales company wants to add an extra bar for seasonal specials, for example, it is enough to modify the interface description file on the server side, without changing the code of the mobile client, the new bar will automatically appear when the interface description is updated.
If you’re about to start an internship, I highly recommend you get started!
