How Blueground’s Engineering Internship Is Fostering Next-Gen Coding Talent
Blueground’s engineering internship is designed to help students take what they have learned in their coursework and apply it to real-world problems. The program is a hands-on experience that lets interns explore the world of software engineering with guidance from our talented team of computer engineers, designers, developers and product managers.
VP of Engineering Stratos Pavlakis sums up the goals of the program as a comprehensive grounding in real-world problems: “How can you take top talent graduates with strong CS fundamentals and fast track them through modern software development? That is what we asked ourselves when we came up with this internship program and that is exactly how we designed it to be: A journey through modern software practices for well grounded engineers.”
Hands-on experience is crucial for a successful internship, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Blueground’s engineering internship immerses students in our fast-paced culture and sets them to solving real problems to hone their theoretical skills for the workplace. Recent engineering intern Rita Chiou shares her experience with the program — including why she decided to join the BeeGee team in a full-time role.
What interns can expect
In their four months at Blueground, program participants get to experience startup culture firsthand while they learn how to apply their technical knowledge in a variety of ways. Of course, this starts with tackling a challenge common to all recent graduates — a professional job interview.
“Not having much experience in job interviews, I have to admit I was rather stressed during the recruitment process,” Rita said. “First, I had to complete an assessment consisting of a variety of questions and scenarios testing both technical and soft skills, however, my biggest challenge was time management. I managed to take a deep breath and answer as many questions as I could with a clear mind.”
Blueground’s remote-first culture was also a key factor in Rita’s decision to apply for the Blueground engineering internship — and working remotely helped fuel her success after she was onboarded. “The remote work option and flexible schedule helped me balance my university studies with my internship, eliminating tiring commuting time and allowing me to take small breaks.”
Discovering your strengths
The breadth of technical ground covered in just four months also helped Rita apply what she had learned in school to some of the hottest technology around today. “During the training and challenge phase I had the opportunity to experiment with a variety of development technologies and methodologies, namely Docker and Kubernetes, ReactJS, GitOps, and Agile.” Exposure to the latest technology is important, and the “sandbox” environment of an internship is perfect for identifying your strengths and preferences. “Being rather indecisive in terms of my future, the fact that I got to work with different technologies and interact with professionals of multiple positions helped me understand where I am heading and where my inclination lies,” Rita said.
Gaining hands-on, real world experience
After a two day onboarding process, the internship program was divided into three phases, a college period that featured workshops on various aspects of engineering, a challenge phase where interns were guided through a full project, and then a final period of being embedded with a particular team — the platform team, in Rita’s case.
The triphasic structure of the internship meant that no two days were the same, giving Rita a full range of experiences during her time at Blueground. “During the “college” period, my day would start with a workshop by a member of the engineering department in their respective expertise followed by studying the company’s policies and the fundamentals of the tech-stack used. I would occasionally join a team presentation or meeting and set up a call with my mentor: a senior engineer assigned to help me throughout the internship. Soon it was time for the challenge phase, a month-long project created by the interns with the aid of our mentors. I would start my day with a meeting to share my team’s progress, ask questions and plan for the day. The rest of the day was mostly pair programming and socializing with fellow interns.”
“Even though we were all in tabs of what the rest were working on, the day when we connected the backend to the frontend was very exciting. Suddenly the synthetic factories and the elasticsearch multi-match queries made sense and rendered the component created by the frontend useful. The day that the project came to life truly helped me put things to perspective by realizing the impact every position in the company has in the final products.”
Rita was nervous about presenting the finished project to the engineering team, but the experience was refreshing and gave her more confidence than ever in her coding skills and ability to communicate with fellow engineers.
“When the project was finalized, we were asked to demonstrate our work to the engineering team. During our presentation we explained our implementation, the obstacles we faced and provided technical details. We also got to listen to the feedback and answer the questions of professionals with different backgrounds, from backend to frontend developers, senior managers to newer members, product designers to software engineers.”
The final stage of Rita’s internship was a two-month immersion on the platform team. “I got to establish a routine similar to one of a permanent position. I would have morning meetings with my team where we would discuss progress and assign tasks for the day. During the rest of the day, I would join in calls with other teams, complete my tasks and shadow the rest of the team members while they performed more advanced work.”
This portion of the Blueground internship experience was just as rewarding as Rita’s time in the challenge and college phases. “An unforgettable milestone during this phase was when I first shipped code to production unsupervised. I remember myself double checking everything trying to make sure nothing would go wrong.”
In addition to pushing her to new coding heights and helping her learn to present her work to colleagues, Rita’s internship with Blueground let her get a taste of full-time employment during her time on the platform team.
“Having to transition from working within the security of the interns group to showing initiative and actively making changes that could affect other teams was a difficult task for me,” she said. Rita worked with her colleagues to grasp the ins and outs of Blueground’s products in order to add her own innovations as new features were added to builds. “With time and guidance from my colleagues, I gained the necessary skills and knowledge to be confident and come up with my own solutions.”
Putting the pieces together
Rita’s experience not only gave her practical, hands-on experience but helped her feel at home in her chosen field and confident enough to take the market by storm. “The most major change I have felt after the completion of the internship, must have been the context of the industry I have obtained and the confidence boost it has provided me with,” she said.
“No matter how many projects someone has worked on their own, courses they have attended in university or online, one thing that internships like this one offer and that I find invaluable is the knowledge of what is relevant for the computer engineering industry at the present time and how “trendy” technologies are connected and used within tech companies.
Her excellent work over the four-month program also led to a full-time position with Blueground. Next year’s interns may well find themselves expanding their skill set under Rita’s guidance. “If I had the chance to design it myself, I think a quick hands-on practice before a more theoretical approach could increase engagement and encourage the interns to be more active as they are introduced to more advanced topics. Additionally, this model would be beneficial to interns who have not yet decided on a specific career path within the software engineering field. The practical part could be an opportunity for them to explore the different options available and choose which are closer to their liking. This way they would be able to discuss with their mentors and supervisors which role they’d like to pursue in the following phases and focus their study on the relevant topics.”
Are you interested in learning more about Blueground’s careers in Engineering? Please visit our Careers page and be sure to follow our engineering team on LinkedIn for updates for our next round of internship applications.
