Week 11. Post 3.

 After this experience, are you considering a career in this specialty area? Why or why not?

This summer I have been working in a software engineering team that was developing a scientific search engine for NCAR. My team's organization felt like a real industry environment as we were using the Agile Scrum framework and many other things that people in the industry use. We worked on both the front-end and back-end of the web application and were deploying our work to "production". It was nice to see how everything works "behind the scenes", how to manipulate database queries, how to work with Java-based frameworks etc.  Thus, I had a nice exposure to what it is like being in a software engineering team. 

Before coming to this internship, I was not quite sure if I would like to go with the software engineering path or if I would choose something else. I thought that software engineering is very challenging and only genius people can do it.  However, I discovered that as long as you put effort to learn - it is not as hard as it can seem. I realized that I would love to continue in this direction - I feel that I enjoy seeing the results of my work on real-world applications and that it is bringing impact. I do not see myself in the research aspect of the CS because I do not think that I have the patience for research that take years. Plus, I saw other research-based projects at NCAR and I realized that I definitely would not enjoy doing something similar to this. 

The lesson I learned is not to put limitations and restrictions in your head. The CS field is very vast and there are many different roles out there and it should not intimidate you. On contrary, it should motivate you to keep exploring yourself and trying new things.