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Published on Wednesday, 28 June 2023 02:33

Each year, our Workforce Development team offers summer internships for students interested in developing their gateway development skills. For the summer of 2023, interns were placed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). We will be sharing some of our 2023 student interns' experiences in a series of blog posts entitled SGX3 Summer Internship Reports.

Featured below is SGX3 summer intern Steven Oh, a student at University of Texas at Austin. Steven is studying computational engineering and is working towards a Bachelor's of Science. 

• What project(s) are you currently working on this summer during the internship?
  • I have been assigned to work on the SCOPED (Seismic COmputational Platform for Empowering Discovery) project, an organization that advances research for seismic analysis. Utilizing the Tapis UI infrastructure that already exists, I am creating a SCOPED friendly version, removing unnecessary functions built into the Tapis framework, including custom branding, and making it user-friendly for those in the SCOPED organization. I am also creating custom Tapis applications of pre-existing SCOPED containers so that the users can analyze their data with ease.
• What are some of the things you have learned or are learning so far?
  • What it means to be a software engineer; both the type of work that I could do in this field and the lifestyle. I have also learned many new programming elements, like the Javascript language (for React and typescript). Lastly, I have become more confident in my own skills. At first, I thought that I wouldn't be able to do as much because of how I don't have much experience, but thankfully I am realizing that I am able to do more than I imagined. This is all thanks to the TACC mentors and my own personal experiences that I've been able to implement into each project.
• What do you hope to finish or accomplish before the end of your internship?
  • I hope to get a lot of meaningful experiences under my belt and just keep on learning. As I've been fortunate to be working on a project (SCOPED) that seems to be very beneficial for the world, I just want to be able to do as much as I can in the project itself. To be able to make a huge impact in the world is something I've always chased and this project feels like the right steps to make at least some type of impact in the world of research.
• After you finish your degree, what would you like to do next?
  • After I finish my degree, I will continue to pursue software engineering by joining the workforce. I hope to be employed at an organization that I believe in and that continues to push for innovation. Specifically innovation that has a positive impact on the world. But we shall see where life takes me! :D
• Are there any ‘aha’ moments you would like to share that have happened during your internship so far?
  • There have been a lot, actually. As I've mentioned before, being assigned this SCOPED project, I was nervous and not confident in my own skills. There were millions of files with a billion lines of code and I wasn't sure if I had the proper prior experiences to do what I was assigned. Ultimately, I took everything slowly and started to figure things out on my own, being able to complete the tasks at hand. Through many trial and errors, I continue to just build my own confidence.
• Have you had any fun outings during your internship with fellow interns or visited parts of Austin yourself?
  • As I am a local to Austin, I have not been really trying to explore the city. However, I have enjoyed every interaction I've had with the other interns! We all come from such vastly different backgrounds, like how 3 of the interns are graduate students, and it's just wonderful being able to hear about their expertise. Everyone is also very friendly and always willing to help each other out, allowing me to ask any questions I may have in this field (without feeling dumb). Ultimately, loving this internship experience! Definitely what I was hoping for and MORE!

Learn more about the SGX3 Summer Internship program. We encourage those interested in participating in future internship cohorts to subscribe to our newsletter for future application announcements.