Story

Christina Liao, MechE, '20

For technical tasks, we had a lot of say in what we wanted to work on. Interns were never forced to work on a task that they were not interested in and worked together with the engineers to find tasks that were both interesting and of value to the company.

 

Venture Republic is a company that oversees several travel sites. The Tokyo office where I interned maintains LINE.TRAVEL.jp, a meta-search site for flights, hotels, and tours. Interns on the Systems Team were not assigned a single large project for the summer. Instead, we got to choose from a pool of smaller technical tasks to take on based on our skills and interests.

The three main tasks that I completed were:

•Researching migration language targets for the LINE.TRAVEL.jp tours webpage, which was previously using the very outdated VBScript. My recommendation to migrate to Node.js was ultimately adopted as the finalized plan.

•Learning how to set up a autoscaling and load-balanced application on AWS

•Designing a prototype of an interactive map view for hotel listings

Fitting this many tasks into 10 weeks required learning quickly on the job, which is a useful skill in the fast-paced development environments often found in tech companies.