Damian Gonzalez

Describe the steps you took to obtain your internship.

In 2021, I was accepted into an academic diversity group called the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. Every year they host summits for different industries that allow scholars to network and gain knowledge about their respective industries. I was invited to the 2022 HSF STEM Summit and HSF provided our resumes to all the company sponsors attending. Bank of America noticed my resume and conducted an interview with me which led to my internship opportunity this summer.

How far in advance did you prepare and begin applying for your experiential learning opportunity?

I began preparing for my experiential learning opportunity in September of 2022 following the HSF STEM Summit when I realized that I wanted to pursue an internship opportunity in the following summer and began taking steps academically to prepare myself such as online programming courses.

If you used any Career Center services, resources, or events to obtain your internship/research opportunity/fellowship, what were they? How did they support your application process?

I used the Career Center back in 2021 when I was first arriving at FSU in order to help make my first resume. Since then I have made numerous improvements to it, but if it was not for my initial appointment with the Career Center to work on my resume back then I would not have had as much confidence to improve my resume and have it in a state where companies would notice it.

Describe some of your responsibilities or duties during your experiential learning opportunity.

I was given a software engineering role and worked on a development team that helped deal with Bank of America's internal data storage and access. I helped develop a program that allowed the team to monitor different processes throughout the bank that the team needed for daily functions. Along with this, I worked with the team to make patches and updates to the primary software used by the bank to store and access data.

What was a typical day like "on the job?"

A typical day on the job started out with a daily team meeting about 30 minutes after arrival at the office in which each member would discuss their individual goals for the week, their progress from the previous day, their expectations for the day ahead, and the opportunity to ask other team members for help. After this call, I would typically finish up any follow-up calls that were necessary depending on my goal for the week and any potential conflicts that needed to be sorted out amongst team members working on similar tasks. Once the bulk of my morning conversations were done, the rest of my day was primarily spent coding and exchanging e-mails across the team as a lot of debugging is done on a daily basis.

What are some major takeaways from your experience? How will these help prepare you for the next step after graduation?

One of the major takeaways from this experience for me was the efficiency with which development teams are able to operate when they properly utilize agile project management methods. Everything across the team felt fluid on a weekly basis and I never truly felt overwhelmed by my work as I was able to create small tasks and focus on those each day and/or week and build upon those tasks. I think these help prepare me for the industry post-graduation because this sort of system is a commonality in this industry so getting experience early on will benefit me tremendously in the long run.

Did this experience help clarify your career path? If yes, how so?

Yes, this experience did help me clarify my career path because prior to my experience this summer I had a lot of questions about how work is conducted in my potential career field and how realistic career progression is. However, because my team had an abundance of members in different roles it allowed me to get a much better idea of how I can forward my career once I graduate and what I can expect not only from the company I worked with, but also just across the industry. It also was a great experience that allowed me to confirm and pursue my passion of programming.