Do you remember your first week of internship at RebelDot?
Definitely. The first week was super fun and I was fortunate to already have some “friends” in the group that I was part of. Oana and Andrei.
Besides them I got to meet the entire team, 17 interns, divided into 3 teams.
The first day was when we all got to know each other. We were this weird mix of people from different backgrounds and universities.
It was amazing to see how involved the senior rebels were in this project and this new collective.
Considering that they were Senior Developers or Delivery Managers, the kind of people that you’d think are super busy, it was genuinely surprising to see how dedicated they were to make us feel welcomed and comfortable and excited for what was going to follow.
Right from the start, after me and my colleagues have been allocated to the project, we benefited from close support from Andrei (Team Lead), Oana (People and Culture specialist), Iulia (People and Culture Business Partner and Tom (Head of Product Design).
They talked us through the entire product development lifecycle, which helped us get a broad perspective on what we were going to work on, as well as create a sense of informality between each other which obviously made our communication super efficient, transparent and friendly.
I could say that we were privileged to have this opportunity, but is not really a privilege because this is the way every internship unfolds at RebelDot. Which is pretty cool.
How would you summarize a day as an intern at RebelDot?
Team-work.
The most important thing I learned as an intern was team-work. In university, most of what you do as a student is then passed through different tools such as anti-plagiarism, so that your work would never be similar to what your colleagues would do. While it does make sense to some extent, I found it rather absurd and upsetting.
On the flipside, throughout my internship I had my own tasks, but also the freedom to work on the very tasks together with my colleague/s so that we’d be more efficient, but also learn from each other.
We’d spend hours in huddles and slack calls, talking and doing what is also referred to as “peer programming”.
You know what.. I’ve seen that “this meeting could’ve been an email” meme so many times, but it was just interesting to see how, in our case, the interns, the moments which brought the most value professionally, but mainly personally, were those never-ending meetings.
I mean.. that’s what crystalized our team.. constant communication helped us develop chemistry, a collaboration that resulted in quality code and an environment where you just liked being a part of.
How did having a mentor help you as an intern?
First of all, Andrei shared with us his own experience and journey. He knew how things were supposed to play out. At the beginning of each sprint, he would give us the direction, that true north, the way in which we had to manage ourselves and each other, the way we had to provide feedback and the way we had to use GitHub in order to make our work easier and more efficient, developing an objective perspective on our output.
I very much enjoyed the fact that this learning process never stopped at the work per-se. Often, there were random moments throughout the day when, if Andrei would feel like he had something insightful to tell us, he would just say it on the spot. I sensed that he was driven by an honest wish to help us develop as engineers, but mostly as people.
What skills should a student have to apply for an internship opportunity?
Technically, I’d say a solid knowledge of basic programming concepts such databases, OOP and algorithmics.
Besides, I’d recommend students to try experimenting their hard skills on a personal project so that they’d learn the basic concepts I was mentioning before by actually practicing them.
And, obviously, a strong drive to learn and be open to new technologies.
In terms of soft skills and personal qualities, what really helped me was simply being open-minded and nice to the people around me.
What does being a rebel mean to you?
Not necessarily thinking outside the box, but just thinking differently about things. Having the courage to stand out by being yourself and by engaging with people.
Do you feel like RebelDot is a place where you can be the rebel you just described?
Yes, I think it is something that happens on a daily basis. I mean we were never constrained to do things in a particular rigid way. We are encouraged to figure things by ourselves, using our own reasoning so that, in case we mess things up, our mentors would help us get back on track by perfecting our reasoning and not by blindly following some else’s way of thinking.