Before even discussing my internship experience, I would first like to thank the Lily Endowment. Without their support and help, this trip and lifelong knowledge would have never happened for me. Thank you. I would also like to extend my thanks to Scott Crawford and his entire career services crew as well as Roland Morin for helping me start developing my career and my personal brand. Special thanks also to the team at Union Station, Trek10 which was an amazing team of guys to work with, Enfocus and the internSJC program they had to run and allowing us to join them, Innovation Park for setting up a fantastic trip to Indy to see what small businesses truly do for investors and jobs, and the Avanti house. Now my journey to the cloud was exciting. Some may ask, what does this trip involve or what does it mean? The story starts with a CEO like no other named Andy Warzon. As a boss and mentor, he brought my attention to virtual machines, new programming styles and the command line, and the cloud. He and his team brought me, Tyler Munjas, and Sam Hanes into their family. While working under Andy and Jared (my programming mentors) they taught me valuable lessons not only within my programming field but also within all technology. Some of these lessons obviously involve structure of code, how virtual machines work, learning the command line, learning the AWS SDK for Python (boto), components of AWS and how they work within the business, decoding other languages and more. During my internship, I coded 11 different scripts for the company in python involving eight different components of AWS. While attacking these components with my functions and programs, I was given high access within the internal accounts of Trek10 as my coworkers saw that they could trust me with this access. I’m glad that I could help in every way I possibly could for the company. We had our fun times as well taking a trip to Chicago for an AWS Summit and enjoying some exposure to the company that made it all happen. We also were able to network with other Wabash alumni and our coworkers by attending the South Bend Cubs games that both Union Station and Trek10 invited us to. I loved the internship experience and were thrilled to see what South Bend and the people at Union Station do to make a difference for their city. I’m glad that I could be so involved with the people around me including my own company, other interns, alumni, and other companies! I hope others experience the journey I did as we climb the mountaintops to the unforgettable place that is the cloud.
