The Journey from Intern to Full-time Employee
When you’re an intern at Ciholas, you are treated just like our full-time engineers. You learn the tools that will be useful on a regular basis as a full-time employee. The main difference is the projects that you will work on.
As an intern, you will be assigned bite-size projects that are usually achievable in the three-month summer session. Regardless of the project, interns are held to the same standards for quality of work. To help achieve Ciholas’ standards, each intern is given a mentor to help them adjust to the tools and culture of Ciholas and a project manager who is actually in charge of the overall goals of their project. Sometimes interns work on client projects, but oftentimes the work is for internal projects that help to enlarge Ciholas’ own intellectual property, such as development within our CUWB system.
Being an intern first is a great jumpstart both for the intern and for Ciholas. The intern gets real experience in what it is like to be an engineer and Ciholas gets to conduct a three-month interview that allows us to determine whether or not the intern would fit well full-time.
“An internship at Ciholas really gives you the experience you need to write high-quality code. It allows you to thrive and pushes you to think deeper and find your own solutions to each new challenge.”
– Matt Gleason, former intern. Matt was hired as a full-time software engineer in May 2020
“The college experience can be very different in that you are cramming a lot of work into a short amount of time,” said Gleason. “With my internship project, I was working with thousands of lines of existing code and needed to add a thousand more. My mentor and team helped me push myself to give 100% towards the project and ensured that everything I did was done correctly.”
When transitioning from an internship to full-time employment, you should anticipate having additional company-wide responsibilities and being a part of more mission-critical tasks that are centered around bigger projects. You will also have multiple ongoing projects that you will be working on simultaneously. At first, it may be intimidating, but as you dive in you will realize that your internship has really prepared you for that first big project. You’ll eventually walk into meetings with confidence and as you grow further in your position you’ll have the opportunity to mentor incoming interns!
