My Internship (or Vacation?)

My journey here began when Tresata’s CEO Abhi Mehta first invited my dad and me to see his new Tech and Big Data company. My dad and Abhi have been friends for many years; my dad and I were nothing but excited for Abhi and his successful new company. After spending a few hours on a summer afternoon learning about what Tresata does, Abhi became aware of my interest in computer science and math and he immediately said “Nikita! You have to come do an internship here.” And what I thought was just a polite offer turned into my first “job” ever a year later. My first day was July 7th; it is an understatment when I say everyone was very welcoming and nice. Not only did the whole team take me out to lunch just for my first day, but they went out of their way to make me feel comfortable and at home.

The goal of my internship was to learn how to comfortably use a programming language (of my choice) and to get a true learning experience of all the different departments in the company. I chose R as the programming language I wanted to work with. The five weeks I was at Tresata, I shadowed different people from different areas of the company every week. Brittany was the one who put together a syllabus and gave me an introduction of the place and people. My first week mentors were Marc and Katie; I did some basic training with Linux and the terminal as well as a mini project on R for Marc and research for Katie. My second week mentor was just Katie. I did some more extensive research on Big Data, Hadoop, other tech companies and social media for her. This research helped her and me as well. I learned a lot more about how many industries use Big Data and for what reasons. I also learned how, although new, Big Data Companies have a lot of competition. However, Tresata seems to be pretty ahead of the game (;

My third week I worked with Vic and Matt on Tableau and Weka. I did my own learning of what Tableau is used for and Alex gave me a thorough tutorial of how they use it for data. It’s described as “Excel on crack” by Vic. Fellow intern Caitlin also gave me a tutorial of what work she does. For my fourth week I did work for Eileen and Jayesh. Eileen had an extremely busy itinerary for me. My assignment was to write a whole manual in Confluence on a Product Developer’s job. Not knowing anything about the job and what they do, I spent many days researching and learning about things like Development Processors, Software testing, testing automation and software jobs. Eileen and I spent a lot of time editing and finalizing the manual.

It was a long and tiring process, but in the end I felt accomplished and like I had really done something effective for the company.

My last week was spent working with R. Arun was my mentor and he gave me many small projects in order to become comfortable with it. I learned a lot about R and how to work R Studio from his projects.

As my internship of five weeks came to an end it was a sad time, not only was I closer to having to go back to school, but I was leaving the coolest work place and the Tresata family. My five weeks at Tresata were so much fun; aside from the bowling outing, the many team lunches and the ping-pong games (which I did not take part in, because I would be setting myself up for embarassment), every day I came to work was a blast. Overall I have learned a lot from my experience and I hope to one day work in a place with similar people and a similar atmosphere like Tresata’s.

Being a rising senior in high school I was only considering the option of pursuing Computer Science in college, but after my internship I am sure that’s what I want to do. So I have Tresata to thank for that.