Interns Invade!

This week marks the largest single influx of personnel the Don’t Panic Labs office has ever experienced. With summer break beginning, we are welcoming 23 student interns from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to start what we expect to be an exciting and fruitful experience for everyone.

The students are divided into four separate teams, each working on a different project. Teams are made up of Juniors who may be less experienced in this type of project and Seniors who have had experience with this by participating in Raikes School Design Studio projects. At least two members of Don’t Panic Labs are partnered up with each team to serve as mentors during the project. Throughout the summer, the teams will also be getting feedback from various individuals based on reviews and presentations.

Each of these projects involve solving a very challenging problem with no simple or clear solution. The teams will be forced to flex their development muscle, work with some interesting hardware, and figure out how to get everything done in one short summer.

One of our goals in providing the internships is to prepare the younger students for the Raikes School Design Studio, where the students tackle a real-world problems by designing software applications that will then be used by companies that sponsored the Design Studio projects.

Another goal for the summer is for the students to gain real-world software development experience in a startup environment, something that’s not too common (yet) in our area and rarely portrayed accurately in the media.

But most of all we want them to learn how to become better software engineers. Their projects will expose them to everything from machine learning, to video processing, to interfacing with popular web services.

We’re looking forward to see what they come up with this summer. It should be a fun time. Be sure to check back as we will be posting updates throughout the summer.