Saint Aloysius College

As part of my thesis in my last year in high school (2017 - 2018), I had the opportunity to (briefly) join the workfield. For my internship, I decided to return to my old high school in Diksmuide and assist my favourite teacher, who also happened to be the IT Admin.

Besides all the mindopening classes he taught in the science field, he taught me a lot about how the school network worked and he continued to inspire me to pursue a career in IT. It was an honour to be able to work alongside him, as he had always been a rolemodel for me and continuously assured me that there are careers for women in science and IT.

Of course, being a public school, the infrastructure was nowhere as advanced as some of the companies my classmates were working at. However, I was excited to be able to leave my footprint at my old high school. They had been looking forward to giving all the teachers new laptops with docking systems connected to the beamers so all the teachers could easily project their screens for the pupils without messing with cables. When I asked if I could do my internship for them, they were glad they had an extra pair of hands to configure and distribute all these devices. It was my job to set up the laptops from a mirror and teach my ex teachers how to use the new devices. They were all very happy to see me again, and were glad I put in the time and effort to give them one-on-one sessions when needed to ensure they wouldn't run into problems mid class.

Another big part of the internship was helping out when needed; a beamer not working, an old laptop that didn't work correctly, a PC in the computer lab refusing to boot... The typical IT Helpdesk stuff! Seeing as my mentor had a very busy schedule as a teacher and practically being the entirety of the IT Department on his own, I was very glad to be able to help him out wherever I could.

Prior to my internship, my mentor had attended an event hosted by Microsoft, and there he had received information on how to introduce coding classes through Minecraft and the micro:bit. He mentioned this over lunch break as we were talking about coding, and he asked me if I was willing to teach a class on this topic.

I spent an entire afternoon teaching 12 year olds on how to code using Scratch, in the hopes of inspiring them to join STEM educations and careers. I was very pleased to see that at the end of the class, many pupils had managed to complete all the challenges on their own, and those who struggled a bit more eventually completed about 90% and were very glad to have gotten the opportunity to see what "coding" (albeit in Scratch) was. I started off doing the first challenge together, showing them how to drag the code blocks and how the code blocks affect the output on the screen, and the second challenge they could raise their hands and suggest how to proceed. From there on, I let them work on their own. Whenever someone had a question, I felt like with my help they genuinely understood what was going on and they knew how to take that information and continue with it. It was very rewarding to see someone go from absolutely clueless to actually being able to understand what's going on and enjoying what they're doing with just my input.

For the seniors, who were mainly my old classmates, I had prepared an exercise on the micro:bit. Being a bit harder than the Minecraft exercises, I made a simple game of RPS that the students had to help develop. It was only a group of 10 people so it was easy to give everyone a chance at sharing their thoughts on how to continue with the code. There was not enough time to teach them how to code in Python, so I showed them the Scratch version instead. However, in the end they were all very interested on how to continue and I sent them my Python version to mess around with after class.

It was an amazing experience to be able to do an internship in my senior year, and I am grateful for my old high school to have given me the opportunity to thank them for all they taught me by being able to teach them and help them make their classes ever so slightly more optimised.

Accenture

During my last year as a undergrad, I was fortunate enough to work for Accenture as a trainee. I was welcomed with open arms into their office in Brussels. Being on their IT department, I was able to join all their meetings on the newest innovations in IT and more specifically security, get a glimpse of all the interesting projects they were working on and generally learn a whole bunch of cool stuff. It was my first experience in the work field of pure IT, whereas my previous internship was more focused on education and using IT as a tool. The project I was working on consisted of making a DRP, and not having had any experience with those gave me the opportunity to get to learn all about the mysterious ways of the Keep Calm And Don't Panic plan.

You've reached the end!

But fear not, here's a bunny to keep you company. 💕

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