I am Sangwook Suh, class of 2023 at Washington University in St. Louis pursuing a degree in Mathematics (Applied Track) with a double major in Computer Science. I am spent this summer as a software engineer intern at EDUrain as part of the Skandalaris Center’s St. Louis Entrepreneurial Fellowship. EDUrain is an early stage tech startup that focuses on helping college students find off campus housing, build credit through reporting rent, and find scholarships through their platform.

What needs the most attention? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself since the start of my summer internship. When I joined the team in early June, EDUrain had recently transitioned into using the Next.js framework for their web application and changed their business model from charging a listing fee upfront to a success-based commission on tenant placement. Since so much on both the tech and business side had pivoted, there was so much that needed attention: refactoring code from the previous website, adding new functionalities, database migration, updating text/blogs, styling, and on top of usual website maintenance.

            I had discussions with my peers and supervisors during team meetings to figure out which tasks were priorities for the business, which tasks were a good fit for my technical abilities, which tasks had closer deadlines, and which tasks interested me the most. A balance between these questions is not always obvious, but I had to figure it out a way, which has and has been a recurring theme throughout the month and a half I’ve spent at EDUrain. It’s also a process that I’ve never had the chance to experience in an academic setting. It involved high levels of communication with not only people in the development team, but also with the sales team. Sometimes things changed from the sales side and we had something new and urgent in the middle of a project.

Compared to the classroom, there was much more flexibility to everything, but I also needed to maintain standards to ensure collaboration in the codebase was not interrupted. I expected to learn a lot of technical skills, and I am definitely done so. There is also so much I have learned outside technical skills that would be very crucial to working a technical job in the future.