For many college students, it’s the time of year when internships are starting up, and they are excited and nervous about what’s ahead. When I was an intern with Vecima, I was looking for a role that had significance with real-world, impactful assignments. I wasn’t sure I could get up to speed quickly, but that wasn’t a concern for the Vecima team. Ultimately – like every intern – I wanted a chance to become a full-time Vecima employee after graduation.

I got all that and more at Vecima.

From the start of my internship, I was assigned a mentor to help me transition from my student role to a professional developer role through the company’s introductory project. One small but critical lesson was how to use Git, an open-source, distributed version control system. It was not just that simple pull-and-push which were the main commands we used on campus. My mentor worked with me one-on-one and lent me a book called Pragmatic Guide to Git to digest it. My first month as a Vecima intern laid a solid foundation for the rest of my development life.

I was impressed with how Vecima quickly assigned me to work on an important and large project called Entra one month later. I worked on designing and developing two important daemons with my team. While my team was developing the software, we had technical overview meetings, a series of sprint meetings, and we did code reviews for each other. The tech stack I learned here included Yocto, Google Protobuf and C++.

Vecima actively promotes lifelong learning for everyone including interns. There were learning sessions and video-watching lunches each week for selected tech topics that improved my overall industry and technical knowledge.

Another thing I will always appreciate is how Vecima colleagues were easily approachable with questions or comments whether they were another intern, a highly experienced engineer or even an executive. If I had a question, they would guide me through it along with any of my follow-up questions and not just brush me off.

My internship definitely had a positive influence on my personal and professional life. At the beginning of my internship, I was a Computer Science student at the University of Saskatchewan with less than two years of academic experience. After my internship with Vecima, I have become a true professional with so much more capability to offer.

For every intern who is nervous about getting started, just be yourself. Your skills will be an asset to your company, and you’ll learn and gain so much. Ask questions, say “yes” to challenging assignments, and lean on your new colleagues. You’ll make connections that will last a lifetime.

I’m Vecima Proud!

To learn more about working for Vecima, we invite you to visit our careers page.