I survived the first two days of my internship! Day one == free food all day long. The morning started with a welcoming introduction of the company. The second part of the morning Human Resource advised the interns of the do’s and don’ts of how to act in the corporate world. It was all pretty common sense stuff. It boiled down to: dress appropriately, think before you speak, and don’t sluff off. Easy enough, right?

The real excitement started in the afternoon when all of the interns were released to their mentor and manager. I was placed in the mobile development unit. I’m going to develop for the iPhone and iPad all summer. 🙂 Furthermore, I’m going to spend about two thirds of my time in Bloomington, IL at State Farm’s Corporate South campus. The other third of my time will be in Champaign, IL at State Farm’s Research and Development Center at the University of Illinois’ technology park.

This summer I am a project leader for an innovationREADY project, which includes guiding a group of interns that will develop software to help Human Resources recruit potential employees at career fairs. The first aspect of the project is to build an iPad app which will collect information from students electronically, instead of using paper and pencil. The other facet of this project is to brainstorm and potentially prototype apps for the iPad that may help various State Farm employees from HR to insurance agents, alike.

In less than a week I will start my seventh internship with State Farm Insurance. I’ve had two summer internships and four school semester internships. This summer I will be an iPhone/iPad developer in State Farm’s Systems Research and Development department. I’m really excited about this opportunity because I spent the last nine months working on iPhone applications building my experience and knowledge base. I think I’ll have a fun and productive summer. Also, I’m relieved that I will be working with tools I’m familiar with. I’ve noticed that work is a lot less stressful if I have a fair amount of experience with the programming language and platform that I’m expected to work with.

Yesterday was my last day working in Bloomington, IL with State Farm Insurance. I meant to post more about my experience in this blog. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. I will share what I believe are the a couple of the most important things I learned from my internship.

First, meet and interview as many full time employees as possible! My mentor gave me a list of 13 employees to talk about their experience with State Farm. I learned more about the company from these one-on-one conversations than I ever could have just sitting at my desk working on just assignments.

Second, take ownership of your work. If you have an idea to enhance your work share it with other people. I met interns at that do exactly what they’re told and that’s it. I’ve noticed that not all people care to share their ideas about how to make their work extraordinary. There were quite a few instances while working on assignments that I thought there may be a better way to approach a problem. My ideas weren’t part of the original design but when I talked them over with my mentor it gave him food for thought, and we eventually came up with better results the more we added ideas together.

Last Friday morning I was greeted me with the “blue screen of death”. It’s not the way I like to start my day. The two largest projects I worked on over the summer were saved on my desktop… and only my desktop. I made a back up of these projects some time ago but I had done a lot of work since the last updates… I felt queazy to say the least.

I can’t stress how important it is to save source code to a version control system. I’ve heard horror stories from other people losing a lot of data, and I always thought it would never happen to me. Unfortunately I lost a lot of data I wish I hadn’t! I guess I’ll just be another person to share a horror story geared towards encouraging people to back-up their data.