Xtern is delighted to host an intern this winter. CJ Woodberry is a junior at Dartmouth College, majoring in Computer Science. Because of Dartmouth’s unique quarter system, students are able to take a term off from classes during their sophomore or junior year. For his off term, he wanted to find an internship that would give him experience as a software developer. More specifically, he was seeking an internship where he would be able to write code and better understand what it is like to develop software in a professional environment.
CJ heard about Xtern Software from his aunt, Deb Zehner, who is the Director of Applied Research at Connected Commons, a client of Xtern’s. He had a few conversations over Zoom with the Xtern team. To CJ, Xtern seemed to have a friendly team, a great environment, and a diverse range of projects. Because of our company size and high level of collaboration, it also seemed like he would have more learning opportunities in his internship than elsewhere.
CJ’s current project involves PHP. He is working on a PHP script that transfers data between databases. The scripts are already written, but he will be incorporating them into a Laravel framework. This will involve making some modifications to them, and creating commands to execute them. Then, he will eventually add some new functionality to the scripts. One example is making it so that every time the scripts are run, they will log whether or not any errors occurred.
Although CJ has enjoyed studying computer science in school and working on projects in classes, he had relatively limited experience coding outside of school. Through his internship with Xtern, he is working with a lot of technologies that are new to him, becoming more comfortable with them, and enjoying learning these things.
We’re so glad that CJ has the chance to learn and grow with us this winter and we can’t wait to see where his education and training take him!