Summer 2020 - I started my internship at Copart as a software engineering intern in their seller department. Copart is an online car auction company that generates revenue by selling cars using their app/website. Cars are sold by sellers and bought by members who are interested in bidding and buying those cars. It was my first ever internship in the U.S., hence I was extremely excited to work and learn along the way. The only time I worked as a software engineer was for Afiniti in Karachi, Pakistan. The experience at Afiniti was great; there was so much to learn from so many talented people. At Copart, I worked as a full-stack web developer. I got hands-on experience with both front-end and back-end technologies. Most of my work was related to writing back-end services and then calling APIs from the back-end and sending back the response to the front-end. Besides that, I also learned how GitHub is used on a larger scale. During my time in college, I only had little know-how about GitHub commands, but when I started working for Copart, I learned a lot about using GitHub effectively and efficiently to merge or push/pull one's code.
My work hours were mostly 9 AM to 6 PM with a 1-hour lunch break in between. Initially, I would work until 6 PM, but then during the last five weeks, I would work late because I was assigned a project that was extremely critical to Copart and had to be completed in a short period of time. So I worked with different team members and learned a lot from them as I worked on the project. A little about the project—it was about making a single web page for a new component that the client requested. I successfully created the webpage by writing front-end (Angular) and back-end (Java Spring Boot) code. I also got a little overview of working with the database side. I was already familiar with SQL and writing queries/stored procedures, so I didn't need to work a lot on that side. My internship at Copart lasted 12 weeks. I went to the office on my first and last day only (because of the pandemic), since my whole internship was virtual/remote and I was working from home. It was also my first working-from-home experience, and I'd say it wasn't bad. In fact, I enjoyed working from home more than the office as I realized I can be more productive at home. But one could have different opinions about that—it depends on what one prefers and is comfortable with.
At Copart, I met a good bunch of people. I was assigned a mentor and manager. My mentor would assign me tasks/stories to work on, and my manager would take updates from me, every now and then, on my work and how I was getting along with all the stuff I was working on. Apart from that, I also got to know other team members who were working on some other projects within the seller team. Most of them were from India and Pakistan. Copart was a diverse company with lots of Asians around, and I also happened to be one of them. There were 12 more interns from UTD who did their internships alongside me. Some of them continued their internship for another semester, but I decided not to continue because I had another internship offer that was better.
To sum it up, it was a good learning experience overall. Copart taught me many things technically and managerially. The overall learning was immense, and I'm glad that those late hours that I invested in my project improved my coding and debugging skills. Well, I can now say that I'm a better software engineer than ever before. Last but not least, I want to thank all those who helped and assisted me during my internship. I alone couldn't have learned enough if those people were not available to offer help and mentor me even when they had a very busy schedule. Huge shoutout to everyone on the seller team.
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