In the summer of 2009, I ran the robotics section of a high school enrichment program called Andrew’s Leap. I wrote and taught the curriculum for the 7-week course. I had two TAs to assist me in-class and the wisdom of Professors David S. Touretzky and George Kantor to help me along. Teaching this course was a great experience that taught me lessons that I wouldn’t have easily found elsewhere.
Managing the two TAs allowed me to learn how best to manage “employees” the hard way; learning from my mistakes. I see the lessons learned through them as the biggest takeaway from my experience. On top of that, teaching high school students about topics that I know in-depth allowed me to refine my technical communication skills.
At the end of the course I received lots of positive feedback, which I am proud to have as an instance of taking on a new challenge in unfamiliar territory.
In the summer of 2008, I interned with Lockheed Martin IS&GS in Gaithersburg, MD. I primarily created GUI prototypes using Adobe Flex 3. I worked on multiple proposals that I cannot say much about as well as Lockheed Martin’s phase II bid for the Iridium NEXT contract, which was selected to go onto phase III.
I learned much from this corporate software development experience. In particular, I was able to learn, utilize, and teach aspects of Adobe Flex 3 in less than 2 months time. I saw Lockheed Martin’s techniques for building large software systems that have real impact on the world.
In the summer of ‘07, I interned for Electronic Arts at their EA-Chicago location. It was my first corporate software development experience. I worked underneath the lead programmer and technical director for a Marvel Comics fighting game. I worked as a member of the game team to develop in-house tools as well as contribute content and functionality to the game. I created a tool for artists to easily view their work running in the game engine, created another tool to dynamically generate the lowest level of detail skins for characters, and eventually worked as a member of the AI team to implement NPC actions. All of my contributions were implemented, debugged, and profiled up to desired standards using Visual Studio .NET. I saw multiple software development iterations and experienced a handful of “crunch” times.
Unfortunately, Electronic Arts shut down EA-Chicago before the game could be released and canceled their partnership with Marvel, so my work will never see fruition in a published game. It was an invaluable experience, though.
Note the citizens that run around during the in-game play. I worked on debugging their behavior.