I have been very nervous and excited about this paid internship at The Dini Group since the moment it was confirmed. As today approached, I doubted my abilities more and more, but finally being at the Dini Group, amongst other engineers, confirmed my passions and desire for software engineering.
My mom and I arrived really early so we took a little walk in the surrounding La Jolla area. She tried to give me a pep talk, but being a teenager, I only listened with half an ear. I anxiously smiled as she took my picture in front of the Dini Group building. I said good bye and she was gone. I was alone with another new opportunity facing me. I have always said yes to passing by opportunities, which I attribute a lot of my success to, but this also means that I have thrown myself into a lot of unfamiliar experiences. As I walked up the stairs into the Dini Group I found myself becoming calmer. It was weird and I don't know quite how to explain it, but I was happy to be at the Dini group. I was back to my normal self: ready to say yes to opportunities, being okay with not knowing information, and enthusiastic about asking questions. I knew the work that they would be giving me was hard... but I like a challenge! As I walked through the halls to Neal's office, I felt comfortable. I had already been to the Dini Group building once for a sight visit and the bright colorful paintings felt familiar. Ann was the first person to say "Hi" to me when I got their. I hadn't met her on my sight visit, but she immediately made me feel very comfortable. She had me read and sign a ton of paper work. I had never had a real job, so it felt like a very adult-ish thing to do. Once I was finally done signing a million papers, I met with Neal. I was eager to start working on something engineering related, at that point. He spent most of the day getting me set up on the computer, setting my email up ([email protected]), explaining how they save and edit files at the Dini Group, explaining the processes the Dini Group goes through to make electronic boards, then lastly explaining my project. My project is modifying another interns existing program that takes the schematic of an electronics board and compares it to the bill of materials that is being sent to the manufacture. This program is used to make sure all the components on the bill of materials (BOM) match those on the schematic before sending the pieces off to be manufactured. They are currently using this program, but it is a bit finicky so my job is to add to the existing code and make it more robust. I started by trying to understand the code which took me the rest of the day and probably tomorrow as well. By the end of the day my brain felt like it was going to explode from everything I learned, which is always a fun feeling in my opinion. In the middle of learning with Neal, we took a lunch break. The entire company (12 employees total) had a pizza lunch in my honor so I could meet everyone and feel apart of the team. Everyone treated me like an adult which I really enjoyed. They were genuinely interested in me, this made a great first impression, obviously. Can't wait to continue for the rest of the month and the summer!
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