Final Voyage

    This is keeping in mind the post I made in the past fall, from then to now it would be fair to say that I have definitely gained more confidence. Not only in myself but in my skillset as well, as I was able to intern at Glendale Community College in the spring of 2024 and at Walmart Global Tech in the summer 2024. From these two experiences as well as the classes I took and are taking for my final semester, I feel like I have been able to gain a perspective that my past self was uncertain of. I used to think you had to be really incredible with programming and command line prompts, but unbeknownst to me it was perfectly fine to not know everything. The colleagues I worked with ensured to me it's fine and even provided me valuable resources to learn from and guiding me with their expertise.

 

    Going through this definitely solidified and gave me more insight into the workings of how corporate life would be like for a software engineer in retail, and a cybersecurity specialist in teaching. In the corporate environment, it's definitely more slow paced and even though the company may be huge, it's important to note that the teams are usually pretty sizeable. The team I worked with for my internship with Walmart was ~40 employees, but I'd say maybe only 7 of us were in Bentonville during the summer, the rest were remote. This was strange to me because I didn't really expect Walmart to allow employees to work remotely, though even for us in town we only had to meet once a week in the office. This was a huge relief for me because I could sleep in instead of waking up to catch the shuttle and I felt like I accomplished more work, which was the case. My project involved having to create a feature within a mobile application, which was honestly really cool; but, there were two problems I didn't know how to program in React Native and since I didn't know how to get all the right tools to accomplish this task. Luckily the team I worked with was pretty nice, and would nudge me in the right direction to make sure I was doing everything to their standard, and at the end I felt better about my skills with mobile development and how to navigate the retail landscape for software engineering.

    The internship with Glendale Community College was also hybrid like, I'd only have to meet with my professor twice a month and go to the main campus at least once a week. Rest of the time was usually researching and studying, which helped a lot with my classes at the time, which was an awesome coincidence. The goals for this internship were to create a program for the GCC STEM day event, which was over the summer, and to teach a class about a topic of our choice. This was definitely a different experience because it felt as if I was training to be like a professor and event planner, but it was definitely a lot of fun. I even got to participate as a helper for a few of the GCC events in the spring, but what I feel like this program totally helped me appreciate was communication. Since I had to talk with three professionals weekly about my progress with my goals and how I have been enjoying things. Along with that, the professor I worked with was awesome and taught me a lot. Not only about cybersecurity, but also teaching, he actually challenged his students' knowledge to see if they are actually doing their assignments and readings. And as it appeared, majority of the students were really attentive and actually participated, some even informed him after class about some job opportunities they were able to get thanks to his help. It was an incredible experience to work with Martin Bencic during this program, he definitely showed how incredible and broad cybersecurity is.

    Overall, I'd say my sense of belonging for the cybersecurity/software engineer space has definitely solidified that this is where it makes sense for me to work. I don't see myself teaching, but many of the communication and networking skills I gained from GCC, along with specialized cybersecurity insight have helped me tremendously. Walmart definitely made me more confident as a programmer and as a software engineer, because not only was my code better over time, the way I was approaching problems and solving them became better as well. As for my concerns with AI, I think it was a nothing burger. AI certainly is really good at completing tasks, but it's either really good at completing specific tasks or is a generalization implementation. Because ChatGPT can certainly write a decent 2-3 page paper, but it isn't going to source everything it mentions, make it into the required format, or ensure there is no redundancy. People will still have to put in the legwork to actually get the desired product, this is also true for programs, it can spit out code but doesn't mean it's perfect. It may work fine, but then it has to work for the code base you're working on or it has jarring security flaws.

    For my next steps, I am going to graduate this December and get some certifications before I graduate. Ultimately, I want to work in Phoenix but if I can't get anything here, I will likely be in Arkansas.