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I believed that I would be given interesting and challenging work to do which would actually be useful, instead of having to do boring and menial tasks which everyone would forget about as soon as I left. I believed that there would be a good atmosphere in the office with people actually interested in the work they were doing, instead of spending as long as possible wasting time. I also believed that the company would have a good social scene.
Fortunately I wasn't disappointed.
Despite my lack of technical experience, I quickly got up to speed in two programming languages (Perl and C) and got down to writing some useful code - some of which was even checked into the actual product! The learning curve was steep and the work was often quite challenging. However there was always someone to ask for help if I got stuck and it meant that the work rarely got boring. There was also never any danger of me not having enough work to do or being forgotten about, as both my manager and mentor both assured me that I was one of their top priorities.
The social side is also quite good with the vacation students meeting up at lunchtimes and most evenings (often to try our luck at the various quiz nights). Data Connection even paid for a restaurant and cinema trip in the middle of the summer to keep up our morale. I have also had the pleasure of living in the company house on Shirley Road (right opposite the office). Despite the fact that it houses nine people but only one bathroom, there haven't been any real problems. Everyone gets on well and there is always someone to talk to.
I arrived at Data Connection with very little programming experience and this summer has given me the invaluable opportunity to learn a lot about writing code and working in the software engineering field. I would definitely recommend a summer internship at Data Connection to anyone, with any level of past experience, who is thinking about a career in software engineering.
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