Summer Internship Experience at Osmosys
The summer internship after the pre-final year for any B. Tech student marks a crucial milestone in their academic lives and career. For me, it was also the first time I was properly stepping into the tech industry and Osmosys Software Solutions welcomed me with open arms. I got the opportunity for an internship with Osmosys for the month of June through my college, followed by a one-year internship and full-time employment as an Associate Software Engineer.
June 2022
The internship began with a very informative orientation with the mentors, followed by an exciting plan to complete the course CS50x (CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science) by Harvard University. This is an entry-level course that encourages students to think algorithmically and create efficient and optimized solutions. It is a 10-week course that covers various topics like data structures and algorithms, software engineering, web development, encapsulation, abstraction, security, and resource management. There are multiple videos, lectures, notes, and exercises of various difficulty levels and we were encouraged to attempt all of them. The course itself cleared a lot of important fundamental concepts of Computer Science that many people tend to forget as they progress onto complex topics.
The challenge was to complete it in 4 weeks and with the mentors’ guidance and insights, I completed the course successfully in the given time period. Weekly tests and meetings were conducted to assess the progress and the feedback helped to optimize the solution and write better code for future assessments.
The Interview
After the one-month internship got over, there was a final assessment, followed by a technical interview and then an HR interview. The questions in the interview included concepts of data structures and algorithms and web development, which were assessed practically through the projects I have created. I cleared the interview rounds and got selected for the position of Associate Software Engineer. In addition to the full-time employment opportunity, I got the offer for a one-year internship at Osmosys which started in July 2022.
July 2022
In the starting week, some of the biggest products and projects of Osmosys were introduced along with tasks for the training period after which those projects will be assigned accordingly. For the first two weeks tasks were divided into two sessions:
- Development Session
- Quality Analysis (QA) Session
In the development sessions, the focus was to learn HTML and CSS, with reference to a Udemy course. There were daily assignments, projects, and exams to assess the progress. All of these codes and their versions are maintained in a GitLab repository, which has increased my confidence in working with Git.
The QA sessions were particularly exciting and challenging as I had never worked with QA tasks before. Sessions were conducted to familiarize us with a project and tasks were given to conduct QA on the output data. The idea was to check if a website’s real-time data has been extracted according to the given constraints or not. The QA sessions and assignments were conducted to get a better understanding of the project and its expected output. The QA process was quite intense and it had to be perfect as missing out on any wrong output or data mismatch could lead to ignorance of bugs in the development phase and this helped me to be meticulous and careful with the completion of my tasks. The testing involved multiple automated tools like a debugger to perform a thorough check at the time at which the data was extracted, as well as manual testing such as sanity testing to determine if the data is properly extracted and organized for further testing. Since reporting errors in the data provided in an excel sheet required proper messages and comments along with proof, I became a better communicator while performing detailed QA checks and writing descriptive messages with proof of errors.
Once the QA sessions were over, we moved on to development sessions in Javascript. The topics were meant to be self-studied with reference to an advanced level Udemy Course. I created several projects to learn the language and practice for the weekly exams, and I kept improving more and more based on the feedback.
Reflections and Next Steps
By the end of July, I have become proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, SQL and Git. Since this internship is a work-from-home opportunity, it is quite important to separate work and personal life, which has helped me a lot in terms of punctuality, planning, and organization. With constant meetings, tasks, updates, and reviews, my formal communication skills, and teamwork has improved as well. This summer has been very productive for me, and a new experience altogether. I am grateful to Osmosys for giving me the opportunity to work for them and for guiding me with my first steps in the tech industry, and I look forward to all the lessons and skills to be learned in the following months.
