Today was nuts! I only managed to write three lines of code during eight hours of work… I feel like I went from meeting to meeting all day. I started the morning off with a reverse mentoring session. During the middle of the day I attended a ‘stand up’ meeting and found out that I’m going to work on Steer Clear 2.0! I went to a business acumen to learn about how State Farm agents are recruited, interviewed and trained to become an agent. Then at the end of the day I met with my innovationREADY full-time leaders and we discussed the iPad application I had worked on in the passed week.

Reverse mentoring is a really neat concept. State Farm’s HR department thought it might be nice if they paired up interns with executives and vice presidents throughout the company. During the summer State Farm leadership and interns are expected to meet two to three times and share perspectives on work at State Farm. I feel very fortunate having been partnered with Kris Berry, the vice president of Creative Services. She is an extremely nice and intelligent person who is easy to talk to. She asked me various questions about my experiences with State Farm as an intern. We discussed my telecommuting internships during the school year and why I think State Farm has trouble recruiting technologically software developers.

I have a new found respect for State Farm agents. I learned that I don’t have the patience or the drive to pursue becoming a State Farm agent. It’s a long and strenuous process. However, it appears as though State Farm’s agent training process is what leads to an agent’s success. State Farm pours a lot of time and effort into developing their agents.

Presenting my iPad application went well and I have fallen into the agile development process. I described to my leaders two approaches to software development methodologies: waterfall and agile. If there was any doubt, my team preferred agile development. At the beginning of each week, I’ll show off what I accomplished in the last week and see how we can further improve our product in the next week.

State Farm was founded 88 years ago today!

Today was great. I traveled to Champaign to work and celebrate founder’s day at the Research and Development Center. I got about 3 hours of work done in the morning and then traveled to a park at 11:30 am to grill out and play bags with all of the interns at the RDC. The weather was beautiful, we played good music and everyone had a great time. It was recess for for interns! After such a relaxing day I’m ready to go knee deep in some Objective-C and Cocoa development tomorrow as I work on our iPad app. 🙂

This week flew by! I’ll recap this week’s highlights with a list.

1. I’m going to star in a video! Well, not really. I was asked to be part of an intern recruiting video. State Farm plans on making a ‘true life’ intern video. I was told that while recruiting interns State Farm is interested in showing off what interns do instead of just telling people about the opportunities. Someone thought it would be cool to highlight my project so I’m going to be followed around by a camera crew over the summer.
2. I had a shortened work week because of Memorial day. I spent two days at Corporate South (State Farm’s technology headquarters). I spent the other two days in Champaign, IL at the University of Illinois’ research park. I really enjoy State Farm’s Research and Development Center because it is built for college students that live in Champaign, IL and it is a fun, informal atmosphere where a lot of work gets done.
3. Apple provisioning is a pain! Apple makes distributing code to their iPhone and iPad platforms unnecessarily complicated! I wasted more time than I care to admit setting up Apple’s provisioning profiles so I could test code on an iPad.
4. I successfully tested code on an iPad. 🙂
5. I met some really cool full-time employees and interns. I noticed that a lot of full-time employees are genuinely interested in talking to interns and they are always sharing some personal wisdom. A lot of the interns I’ve met have great personalities and they’re enthusiastic about their work.

My first week went pretty well and the time flew by. Thursday I traveled to Champaign, IL and I met two more interns that I will work with on my innovationREADY project. My team consists of two computer programmers, an intern from Strategic Resources and an intern from Property and Casualty Actuary. I’m not sure how the P&C Actuary will fit into my project but I will find out soon enough.

Unfortunately, my mentor fell behind on his work this week and I didn’t get to spend too much time with him, nor did I get any assignments from him. During the little bit of time I spoke with my mentor he gave me a good first impression, he seems friendly and passionate about his work. During our discussion I was informed that I might get to develop for Microsoft Sync near the end of the summer. I hope I get this opportunity, Microsoft Sync is a fairly impressive product.

Since I didn’t get much to do from my mentor I focused on iPad development. I played around with a couple of the new features introduced to the iPad SDK and I brainstormed ways I could start designing/prototyping our innovationREADY HR iPad recruiting app.