How I plan to apply my learning from my Explore internship

During my internship, I have worked on Project management and software development parts by rotating between the two roles. During the project management rotations, I learned how to empathize with product users and the importance of user empathy to developing customer-centered products. I plan to apply this approach to the different Computer Science and non-Computer Science class projects in school. Beyond writing code or the project's technical parts, I will always consider the broader impact of my class projects and the different challenges the projects solve. Furthermore, I learned a lot about verbal and non-verbal communication from the various customer interviews we conducted. For example, when we conducted beta testing interviews with customers, it was necessary to interpret their reactions as they used the feature's minimum viable product. I plan to apply these speaking, listening, and analytical skills in my labor position as a Teaching Assistant and my interactions in and outside the classroom.

During the software development phase, I am appreciating the power of breaking complex tasks into achievable sub-tasks. At the start of the development cycle, it was overwhelming to think about the size of the project and how it covers Excel Desktop and Excel online. I often wasted time worried about tasks that were not in our version one prototype and felt overwhelmed to start. However, after my team broke down the project into smaller tasks that we have worked on in parallel, it has been less overwhelming and easier to concentrate on the assigned sub-task. I plan to apply this skill to the different class and labor tasks at school to prevent getting overwhelmed by the size of the assignments.

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