About Me

My name is Nevin and I am an international student from Malaysia that is currently pursuing my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering, Engineering Management, and Entrepreneurship (CO-OP) at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

I was recently hired as a Full Stack Software Developer Intern at IBM Toronto Software Lab, and I wanted to share my internship experience at IBM Toronto in this blog. My internship duration was over two CO-OP terms (eight months long), beginning in May 2019 and till the end of December 2019. IBM is one of the Tech companies that offer a wide range of available internship positions for developers ranging from Backend, Frontend, AI, Data Science and beyond. This gave me the opportunity to apply for several positions that I was interested in building up my skills.

The Interview

My interview consisted of many stages, including an online coding test. The online coding test was quite challenging and required me to complete all types of full stack development coding scenarios. After I heard back from the interview, I was quite excited to hear about the job offer. In addition, IBM assisted with my relocation from Ottawa to Toronto.

Experience and Skills Developed During My Internship

Throughout the internship, I had the opportunity to work with various Open Source and IBM technologies. I was able to build up many sought-after technical skills in our industry, including full stack development in popular languages, data cleansing, analytics and machine learning. Upon my internship term coming to an end, I realized that I have grown to be a more well-rounded developer who thinks about all aspects of code delivery, ranging from user experience to scalability, reusability and reliability. I became more confident in programming, communicating, researching and understanding how to utilize various APIs.

In IBM, one of my responsibilities included building analytical dashboards using data science tools and libraries that helped our leaders to make critical business decisions. Furthermore, I was very excited to be given the opportunity to explore various machine learning libraries and techniques to enhance the project that I was working on. I was able to work and deploy a machine learning model using Watson Studio on IBM Cloud. I was proud that the machine learning model could be used as a REST service so that it could be utilized by different business applications.

Since IBM has thousands of employees across the globe, it gave me the opportunity to collaborate with people from different countries and time zones. It was very interesting to work with people who have a breadth of expertise and asking questions to learn from them. In comparison to past experiences I’ve heard from various other co-ops; this internship also gave me the opportunity to be a fully contributing member of the team from a production feature delivery standpoint. Moreover, I had the opportunity to have peer reviews. Throughout the peer review process, I learned various ways to improve my coding abilities, work towards industry coding best practices, think about scalability in the future, and this helped to prepare me for post-grad developer positions. Furthermore, working at IBM has helped me to understand what type of position I want after I graduate.

Extra-Curricular Activities at IBM

Aside from the technical side, IBM also had plenty of intern events. The events were organized by a society called Future Blue. A lot of the events involve team-building activities, games and workshops. The biggest event highlight was Future blue day, a welcoming activity that consisted of over 200+ interns that came from all over the Greater Toronto Area. In the lab, there were many activities to take a break from work. For example, lab wide movies, board games, pool, arcade games, table tennis, gym, massage chairs and group soccer. In my team, we also went out for many team activities including lunches and dinners where we had the opportunity to get to know our peers on a social level outside of work.

In Conclusion…

I was very fortunate to have an internship at IBM. It was a lot more than I expected with regards to skills and career growth. I was able to build up a lot of technical skills that have prepared me for my upcoming future career. It also gave me the responsibility of leading my own project. I was fortunate to be surrounded by supportive coworkers during the internship term. I met a lot of great people and I was very proud to work with a company that supports equality and diversity. I would strongly encourage every student to apply for an internship at IBM because they have an amazing culture and there is always an opportunity for you to contribute in a meaningful way. I would like to take this moment to thank my manager and my team members for the amazing opportunity.