Bryan McClain, a Computer Science student at the School of Science at IUPUI, landed a remote internship with the fundraising software company OneCause this past summer. During his internship, McClain would start his day on a 15-minute Zoom meeting that the company called “Stand-Up”. During this meeting, each developer talked about what he did the day before, what he planned to do today, and any obstacles keeping him from getting the work done.
Since it was remote, his internship relied on applications like Jira, Slack, and Zoom for communication and collaboration.
McClain explained, “We used a system called Jira to track what tasks needed to be completed, and each developer picked what tasks they would like to complete. As a team, we communicated with each other over Slack to ask questions and get technical help. Sometimes we had impromptu Zoom meetings to help each other when necessary.”
He also used Zoom to meet with team and product managers to discuss any issues with their projects.
At OneCause, McClain had the chance to work with the development team on product features. Because he worked on actual product features, McClain’s accomplishments were features automatically deployed to production by the continuous integration system after testing and review in the deployment environment. This means that everything he worked on during his internship was readily usable for OneCause’s consumers.
Moreover, there were two features that McClain was particularly proud of. His first feature was org-driven payments which allows organizations to process payments manually. After working with the development team for 10 weeks, during the final week of his internship this feature was pushed to production.
McClain states, “I thought it was astounding to see the process of building a complex feature from start to end, and I was really proud to be part of this process.”
The second feature was a major improvement to OneCause’s code generation tools.
According to McClain, “OneCause has developed an in-house program that can auto-generate code for allowing the microservices to send requests to each other.” Microservices architectures make applications and faster to develop and enable innovation while accelerating the implementation of new features. McClain’s changes completely reworked the original code and made it much more functional. His code is now helping developers from all the engineering teams at OneCause.
At the School of Science, McClain is currently part of the 4+1 dual BS/MS program in Computer Science which he is thoroughly enjoying because he can work on his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the same time. He has been impressed with the quality of professors that we offer at IUPUI and the scholarship opportunities available. McClain thanks the School of Science for all the opportunities it has brought him. After completing his master’s degree, he hopes to stay with OneCause as a full-time employee.
For his fellow Science Jags, McClain advises not to be afraid of applying for internships, even if you do not feel qualified. Take risks because you never know the outcome if you don’t attempt it.