SLU Student Uses AT&T Internship to Learn, Serve Remotely Due to COVID-19

I was originally hired on to work at the AT&T St. Louis office, which is very close to SLU’s School of Law. However, due to COVID, that plan changed. I was able to complete my internship remotely, through a company laptop that was sent to my house by AT&T.

One challenge I faced due to being remote was working with people in different time zones. The entire Network Call Automation Team was in a different time zone than me, so I had to be conscious of what time I scheduled meetings with them and when best times were to ask questions or to get support.

Being remote was definitely a much different experience had I been in person. However, it was still an amazing opportunity.

Overall, this was an amazing experience and I met a lot of great people.

I got to learn about AT&T culture and, basically, what it's like to work there. I was included on different video calls about professional development, AT&T leadership, diversity and inclusion and the business direction of AT&T.

I even got to sit in on a meeting with the CTO (Chief Technology Officer). I enjoyed my time with them this summer and it was such a great, positive experience.

During the internship, I had three main roles: my business partner work, intern innovation challenge work, and community service volunteering.

My business partner work was real work for the company that benefits one of the services AT&T provides. I did not do "busy work.” I was assigned to work on the Network Call Automation Team and got the opportunity to work alongside the team and my assigned business partner.

On the team I was tasked to write soft tests for the AT&T VOLTE (Voice Over LTE) network. Soft tests are test I write that simulate different kinds of calls that can be made using the AT&T VOLTE network. These tests are thorough and include a large range of circumstances including different clients, holding, 911 First Net calls, forwarding, etc. Through this experience, I learned a lot about networks and VOLTE.

I feel very blessed to have worked on the Network Call Automation Team because I got to work alongside some of the most brilliant and kind software developers; the team was a joy to work with. It was sad to leave when my internship ended.

The Intern innovation Challenge is a challenge that AT&T gives to their interns every year, usually based on a theme. This year the theme was to build a piece of software that would be beneficial if another pandemic (such as COVID) or natural disaster happened. I worked in a team of fellow TDP interns from the St. Louis office and we decided to build a software that would benefit the online education industry as we saw how many students have moved online due to COVID.

Specifically, we saw that there was shortage of ways students can collaborate with each other and be hands on with their course work. Our software, 3: Space, is a 3D education tool built to be used in a virtual environment (can be used in person too however) that benefits both teachers and students.

3: Space allows students to collaboratively or individually build 3D scenes or dioramas to assist with the understanding of class content. The software has many different applications and can be used in all courses ranging from STEM to the humanities. 3: Space also supports virtual reality (VR), which is instrumental in online learning.

Students can either view 3: Space scenes on their laptop or in VR (if they have the proper equipment); this allows students to view scenes and interact with class content in a truly unique way. This in itself opens up a lot of different uses including teachers taking students on virtual tours of different monuments or museums for example.

I have submitted a patent for the software, and it is currently patent pending.  I worked as a full stack developer on the team and the software used the following technologies: Angular, Spring, and A-Frame framework.

In addition, my team used agile development principles when building the program and arranged ourselves into a scrum team. We had daily stand up to talk about what we all were working on. Utilizing agile principles in our workflow is what full time developers use when building program; 3: Space was a great opportunity to practice these skills.

Through the process of printing the ear savers, I was able to learn about 3-D printing. My mom and sister are both nurses, so this project holds a special place in my heart.

I feel very blessed to have been a part of this project with AT&T and been afforded the opportunity to give back in this way.

The experience supplemented my course work and gave me the opportunity to apply some of what I learned in the classroom.

Also, this has impacted my choice of classes moving forward; I plan on now taking databases and networking classes because I have seen how important these two skills are in industry.

Interning with AT&T has given me great experiences that I will take forward with me throughout my career.

For starters, I gained a great deal of technical skills in full stack development and test automation which I will take with me into future professional endeavors.

Also, it allowed me to explore what it's like to be a software engineer in industry and allowed me to figure out what field or area I am most interested in. This will give me a better idea of what I enjoy doing so I can apply to jobs and internships in the future that I am most interested in.

Career Services and Floyd Welsh, my advisor, always treated me as unique person and catered to me purposefully using cura personalis.

I received a lot of support from Career Services as they proofread and made edits to my resume.

They helped me navigate a difficult situation when I received multiple different offers for software engineering internships and gave me really great advice that led me to getting my first choice of internship with AT&T this summer.