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Change life from details- My internship with Porchster [SkIP 2020]

Yuxuan Ding (MS '21)
August 7, 2020
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Hi everyone, my name is Yuxuan Ding. I am a graduate student at the McKelvey Engineering School of WashU, majoring in Electrical Engineering. This summer, I have had the chance to intern at Porchster, a tech startup that is developing a smart locker to make our package arrive home safely.

I met my venture Victor Burke at the Skandalaris job fair. He was wearing a blue t-shirt with Porchster printed on it and talked to everyone about the company’s story. I was motivated because Porchster is the company, making people’s lives more convenient in some small ways.

I work with two other interns to develop mobile and web app for Porchester. These two interns are also WashU students. This internship is also my first time to develop a product in the industry. Before that, the only experience I have was the class project, like 503 and 438. There is much difference between the real product and the theory I learned in class. For the real product, there more aspects to consider during the developing process, such as whether the UI is user friendly and the stability of the product. I am very lucky to have two interns work together, every time we encounter problems, we will meet and discuss together. And our venture host is very nice, and he will try his best to help us solve problems.

10-weeks passed in a flash. What I learned the most in these ten weeks is how to debug efficiently. When doing school projects, the teacher will give us the correct answer or standard. But when it comes to industry, there is usually no correct answer. Every time you add a new function to the application, it may conflict with the previous module. And even the IDE Android studio is also shut down for some unknown reason. In the beginning, debugging is very painful. I usually spent a whole day on solving one little bug. Through these ten weeks, I have mastered many debug methods. Additionally, my ability to solve problems has also greatly improved.

In the end, I want to take some time to shout-out to Jacob Gilhaus and Jeff Che for working with me during the internship. We have a very good time together. I also want to thank Victor Burke for providing me such a great opportunity to work at Porchster.

 I wish Porchster every success for the future!