Student Intern Perspective
This past weekend, I read a great blog post by Benjamin Kudria, a student who was just finishing a programming internship at the New York Times.
In it, he talks about the project he worked on, the tools and code he used, and other really interesting stuff like their use of the cloud, especially Amazon’s S3 and EC2. People are quick to say newspapers (like email) are dead or dying, but a giant like the New York Times is really doing some groundbreaking stuff on the web.
By the end of the summer, I was reluctant to leave (both The Times and my East Village apartment paid for by The Times), but I was grateful for the incredible learning experience. I learned all about S3 and EC2, all the intricacies of REST, and more about the internal quirks of PHP than I ever wished to know. I helped build an application and API that utilized all the inner workings of The Times, including the Linux servers, the database access layer and caching mechanism, the web server, and the PHP libraries, so I became familiar with the total infrastructure used to serve the extremely popular NYTimes.com. All the technologies and techniques I learned were helpful and interesting
Posts like this also motivate me to make sure that I can offer the students that work for me the best experience possible, and allow them to get experience with multiple tools, much like Jason Brown did for me when I was a student at Duquesne. That approach certainly worked for me and I think it’s worked for my students over the last six years here - many of my past students are now working full-time web development jobs in the private and educational sectors.
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3 Responses to “Student Intern Perspective”
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Thanks for the feedback, Mike.
Newspapers, in the physical form, I think, are slowly on their way out, but that doesn’t mean news organizations - especially prominent ones like the NYT - are going to go too. There will always be a place for professional quality journalism.
You can read my thoughts on this topic more here:
http://ben.kudria.net/2008/05/26/the-new-york-times-and-the-death-of-old-media
It would be great to hear your perspective!
-Ben Kudria
That’s awesome! My students are definitely my favorite part of my job. Working with them and teaching them not just the technology but why to use what and the marketing behind it is real rewarding. Plus I know I’m leaving them with a skill that will be useful in whatever field they go into. Most of my student workers aren’t even tech people but accounting, english, marketing majors. Being able to write a letter of recommendation for a previous student to get into Journalism school and the excitement when she got into Emerson was definitely a highlight!
Working with students is truly a delight. It’s my favorite part of the job, too.