Into the Cockpit: Experience of Being an Intern

I have been blessed to have the opporutunity to be doing my third software related internship at the moment. It dawned on me that being an intern is like flying a passenger airplane untrained.

You’re hired on as an intern and put in a seat with controls all around you. You’re familiar with some of the buttons and levers around you, some you can deduce what they do, and the rest you have no idea what they are for. The mentor sitting next to you is communcating with the control tower with words you don’t understand. Thankfully you’ve got some manuals on your hands, and in the past few years, an AI system has rapidly developed to be a copilot for you.

The task is still daunting. In your hands are the livelihoods of people on the plane. Yourself, your mentor, your coworkers, the people relying on the system you are working on.

But thankfully this airplane exists in the digital space¹. Mistakes made can be reverted by a simple click of a button or a few commands. And your mentor and the company probably won’t let you be responsible for very critical software. So perhaps it’s more fitting to say that being an intern is like playing a flight simulator, but things are a little more high stakes.

Granted I am doing a computer science degree, doing side projects, learning in my free time, but I wasn’t prepared for some of the things I have been doing. It may not be possible to be fully trained for everything one will encounter.

Maybe I wrote this as I saw the connection to the critiques around software “engineering” not being actual engineering. We don’t get much formal training, and aren’t held up to the same ethical/safety standards that “real engineers” are.

Or it’s just a reminder to myself to be aware of the situation I am in, and of the responsibilities I have.

Footnotes