Interning at CNBC Fall 2018 was a rewarding experience. While many of my fellow classmates had internships at the IT Help Desk on campus and other local brick and mortar locations, I had the opportunity to venture into Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and work as a Full Stack Developer Intern for the CNCB Quality Assurance Team. In this role, I worked with React on the front-end and Java Spring Framework on the back-end working on a Dashboard for the QA teams.
CNBC engineers believe wholeheartedly in pair-programming. I was not just thrown into the water during the internship, but I was allowed to swim in the codebase. When I struggled, there was always a life preserver. This means that I was given full ownership of my project; however, when I needed help there was always someone to help me. My project involved creating a health check monitor for all the CNBC Quality Assurance Teams, which is broken up into Mobile (iOS & Android), Web, Skyrock, Market Data, On-Air and other teams.
The teams use Jenkins and TestRail to keep track of scripts written for the various platforms that they support. Since there are so many teams, keeping track of all those scripts can be cumbersome and can add to the loss of company money if they were to go down. My job was to maintain a dashboard that shows the health of these scripts so stakeholders such as management and project managers don't need to get into the weeds of the code to know that there is a problem and give instructions to fix the problem.
This project was not only rewarding, but it allowed me to feel like I had impact on transparency in the organization. I had a mentor who guided me when I had questions and encouraged me to continue going even when I did not understand the problem at hand. Because of the support from him, by half way through the internship I had reached an efficient flow in my work processes, I learned how to debug a production server, write cron jobs scripts for batch processes, dive deep in react code, and make methods in java more efficient.
Simultaneously to my internship at CNBC, I was also completing my final requirements for my degree at Montclair State University. This meant I was on the job market and eagerly looking for a new role. CNBC cares deeply about creating a career pipeline for students, so much that they offered me a full-time consulting opportunity with the firm. All I did when I got the news was take a week of, move to a new desk, and I started with the team right after. Now, I am currently working as a QA Lead for the Market Data Team, which deals with maintaining the foundational API that supports all of CNBC's suite of products. It's just amazing the transition from college student to working professional that unfolded in a matter of months, which I would not be able to do if it were not for the CNBC team.
Find out more about this year's internship.