This year‘s Roweb Summer Internship was met with a lot of excitement by students in Pitesti and Craiova. In July and August, during the 5 sessions, the students were given tutorials and homework and attended practical demonstrations at our offices, meant to help them build, with the support of one of our specialists, an application that would include all of the key elements of the technology they chose to study during the internship.
All of the interns showed great interest and motivation, as well as the ability to learn new concepts and work procedures at a very fast pace. The level of difficulty was greater than last year, but the interns rose up to the challenge and took the opportunity to expand the knowledge they had acquired in classes, gain practical experience and learn what it takes to build a career in programming and work day-to-day in a software company.
Summer Internship in Craiova – PHP
Over 80 students applied for our summer internship at Roweb Craiova, so we asked them to take a test as part of the admission process. We selected 14 students and our colleague Ion taught them how to build a custom CRM using PHP. The CRM application had a frontend based on adminLTE and enabled different types of users to manage content, send messages, receive notifications and create tasks. They learned to use Lumen, a PHP micro-framework, on the backend and React.js on the frontend.
The main challenge for the interns was understanding an API-based application and switching from Laravel to Lumen. Splitting the learning program into backend and frontend helped us teach them in a more efficient way, we learned that this is the best way to go for our future summer internships as well. From last year’s experience, we also learned that it’s better to select fewer students and teach them at a faster pace and more advanced level so that they make the most out of this learning opportunity. We gave them the tutorials in advance and used our time together for practical work and answering their questions, which improved communication & their level of understanding and helped them learn more over the same number of sessions, compared to last year.
The students also really appreciated their one-on-one talks with our colleague Florin, the head of our Craiova office during the selection process. They had a lot of questions and even those who were not selected for this year’s internship were very appreciative of the information and attention that they received.
Summer Internship in Pitesti – .NET & PHP
In Pitesti, we had both a PHP and a .NET summer internship. We had three times more applicants than last year, so again we had to use a test and assess their knowledge before selecting 17 students for each framework. The students that opted for the .NET framework learned to build an API with a front-end application. They were already familiar with .NET, but their main challenges were learning about Web API and building an app on their own. Our colleague Gabi demonstrated an example and the students applied the same principles to their own APIs.
The students that were selected for our PHP program in Pitesti learned to build a modern API-based application using Laravel. Some of them go to University in Bucharest, but are originally from Pitesti and were glad to have the chance to complete their summer internship in their home city. In this program, too, they were given learning materials in advance, shown how to build the application and then worked on their similar individual projects. Even after the summer internship ended and we had already given them their certificates, we still welcomed those that wanted extra help with their apps, to make sure they fully understood what they learned.
All groups had the full support of everyone in our offices and appreciated the relaxed & encouraging environment in our company. What we found most impressive, in addition to their enthusiasm and willingness to learn new skills, was the fact that they also collaborated and helped each other, even though they were also competing for our limited positions in a paid, extended internship. This will take place over the next months and will help us select the most talented for full-time positions in our company. We really appreciated their team spirit, as this is very much in line with our company culture, and decided to invite over a quarter of all summer interns to stay with us for the extended program.
Stay tuned to find out how many of them will join our team full-time! 🙂
