Hasnain Maqsood

College: CUNY Queens College

Education Level: Bachelor's of Arts

Career Interest: Software Engineering, Cloud Engineering

I am an avid gamer and I also have a fond appreciation of working out, I have a keen interest in working in either software engineering or possibly working related to cloud platforms and on top of that I have 2 cloud platform certifications, including the AWS CCP or amazon web services certified cloud practitioner as well as the Microsoft Azure 900 certification, I enjoy learning new things and I've learned to embrace the unknown, there used to be a time where if I was not immediately good at something I would feel like not learning it, but I've learned to move past that mind set and then give myself time to understand what I should be doing

What was your role?

I worked on creating updates to the Goals/Milestones card to allow for more clarity on what setting those goals and milestones does, I worked on the front-end with HTML and CSS for the Unadat Website

What did you work on?

What was the impact of your project?

The impact of my project was that it was an important piece of the Unadat website, it allows for people who have created an account to have much more distinct explanations of what certain things do, for example the amount of information that would be necessary for someone to understand how to manage the debt they have found themselves in, it is necessary for the customer to know when their next appointment with a Money Coach is as well as how many goals/milestones they`ve reached, overall a strong impact on the clarity of the website and what we`re working towards

What did you learn or improve on from this internship or from your teammates?

My teammates were the most beneficial part of the internship, I was able to meet new people and we were all able to bounce ideas and code off of each other and help improve our code overall, if this had been solo projects it would have been very difficult to figure out most of the problems that had arisen

What skills have you gained?

New skills that I picked up were working with websites such as Jira Software by Atlassian, as well as working with the Google cloud, given that I already had experience in AWS and Azure using the cloud wasn`t as daunting of a task as it first seemed, and even though there were plenty of bumps along the road, I did gradually start to understand what was expected.

What was the biggest roadblock you've overcome?

The biggest roadblock we`ve had to overcome was the understanding of the google cloud, at the beginning of the internship my team and I worked on the website but used stuff such as inspect element and other similar things to create a separate page for the Unadat website, but as soon we were able to get some clarity from messing around with the google cloud platform we were able to start getting work done, there was also some communication issues but those weren`t nearly as big as the issues we had starting off with using the google cloud and we were able to fix both of these issues in a good amount of time

How has company culture guided your work?

The companies culture guided my work fairly strongly, as it is the culture from our supervisors encouraging and assisting us with clarity issues that made the work more understandable and manageable, we were always able to reach out to our supervisors at any time during the work day and we would often get a response to help with our problems

What was your experience at Unadat?

My experience at Unadat, despite being a short 3-4 weeks I had felt that I learned a whole lot of information about HTML and CSS as well as understanding how a website should work, and that the amount of effort you put into the formatting and making sure everything looks great is very vital step in making sure that the website looks well and functions well, I wasn`t able to work too much on the backend with little experience in PHP but I was beginning to understand a bit more about it before the internship ended

What was one big project you worked on during the internship? Can you walk me through the process?

One big project I worked on during the internship was the Goals and Milestones checklist, there had already been some given milestones but the goals were not nearly as complete, and with the use of the internet as a guide, we had created a checklist that was a placeholder for more information to come soon, given that we were so short on time it was difficult to get through as many issues as we`d have liked to, but we were able to get a majority of the goals fixed up and ready to go

What advice would you give to future interns?

My advice to the next crop of interns would be to take as much time as you need to learn what you need to learn, not everything is as cut and dry as possibly front-end, the back end I can imagine is slightly more complicated but as long as you put in the work each day, you should be solid