NASA Headquarters
June 7 – August 13, 2021
Goals of your project/s:
My projects included designing a Microsoft Team, a SharePoint Website, and porting code from SAS to Python. The team and website were designed with project management in mind. A large collaborative project was ongoing and the tools my partner and I designed were intended to help the management team become better organized. The coding project was to increace redundancy and help a mentor learn about Python.
Describe what you did during the internship:
During the internship, I spent a decent amount of time in meetings. These were mainly for the project management project as I needed to receive a lot of input from higher level individuals on what they wanted to see on the team and website. I also worked with my partner, Ben, quite a bit. We used Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for most of the internship designing the platforms, uploading documents, and testing features. I also coded for the second project quite a bit. This involved learning to read SAS, learning the pandas library, and writing/debugging the code.
Did you achieve your goals? What were the results and conclusions?
Yes, Ben and I achieved our goals. The team and SharePoint were successfully constructed. The Python code ran correctly and was used to help others learn the language. At the end of the internship, we had designed a platform for collaborate work and better project management organization. Additionally, we had a script written in Python which replicated a similar script in SAS.
Describe positive lessons learned from this experience:
Some positive lessons would include presenting skills, workplace basics, and online telework. I got to practice presenting and talking in front of large groups with many people. This was valuable because I was able to become more comfortable speaking in-front of large groups. Some workplace basics like being conscientious of time zones were also learned. Lastly, I got used to the teleworking environment, etiquette, and best practices.
Describe negative lessons learned from this experience:
A negative experience from the internship might be that processes can move slowly when communicated only via the internet. Sometimes projects and decisions take longer than expected due to circumstances that I could not change. In the future, I will know to expect this and hopefully take actions to avoid wasting others time.