Hi everyone, this is Will Wang. I am a rising junior at the McKelvey Engineering School of WashU, majoring in Computer Science and Finance. This summer, I had the privilege of working for EDUrain, which helps students with three things: FIND, FILE, FUND.
Firstly, we provide students with the integration of 50,000 scholarships into a single database, and they can find scholarships easily. Besides, by using our platform, students can file the FAFSA (at no charge) in under 5 minutes versus an average of 45 minutes by answering a few questions and uploading photos of their tax forms. Last but not least, students are given access to a credit advance marketplace, which helps them gain access to the most affordable off-campus housing. Through partnerships with credit card companies, we will be able to fund students’ housing using their own financial aid packages.
What initially drew me into EDUrain was Bryon Pierson, the founder, and CEO of EDUrain, when we talked about what EDUrain was about and what his vision for the start-up was. As we spoke, I was not only interested in working in EDUrain because he is inviting, nice and open-minded person, but also because I have had similar core values as him. I see value in EDUrain because, ultimately, we are helping people to get more funds for college. The good intention and huge market available would put us in a very good position.
Through the course of the internship, I mostly worked on implementing how our back-end software system will be like. When users (scholarship applicants) want to submit a tax/income document online, they could simply upload the document onto our platform in a secure way, and we would be able to extract out key information from those documents automatically, removing the hassle of having them to key in their personal information manually. Moreover, I worked on how to make sure the API endpoints are ready to be called and looked into different technologies for doing so, such as Flask in Python. Last but not least, I was involved in some of the code reviews of our front-end team, mostly involving the REACT framework.
I considered myself to be very fortunate to be able to join EDUrain this summer, and even though I am a software engineer intern, I was still able to participate in the business strategy meetings with the team. Through the meetings, I was able to understand the operations and management a lot better. Creating a start-up is not easy, as it involves setting up everything on your own, tasks ranging from IP protection, and getting money from investors to making sure the software is working and welcomed, just to mention a few. This experience of working at EDUrain this summer made me look up to my CEO Bryon even more, as I understand how difficult it is to get to where he is right now. I would treasure this invaluable experience for years to come and hopefully go into the start-up world in the future to create a common good for the society as Bryon did.
I had a great time with my internship, and I am extremely happy that I have met the fascinating EUDrain team. I have also seen myself grow both professionally and personally. Thank you for those who helped me along the way. Appreciate it!