Umniah Mobile

JORDAN

UMNIAH MOBILE

BA Human Sciences, Second Year Undergraduate, Remote working

Work Projects

I was working with the Tank, a non-profit business incubator focusing on the tech industry. The project was rather wild now that I am thinking about it. The Tank was looking to give a big transformation on its operation processes, i.e. how it "incubates" start-ups during its fixed one-year incubation period. My main task was to conduct research and advise on how we should design this process. The good thing was I could be creative and make an impact in my own way. After thorough desk research and rounds of interviews, I gave in a proposal consisting of a general operation process map and reasons why we should operate like so.

What was encouraging was that Umniah accepted my model, not completely, but almost. After we finalised the operation model, we further researched how what KPIs we should use for both start-ups and the incubator. In the end, we finalised a good plan for the future operation. During the process, I was able to ask questions and communicate with Umniah staff about almost everything I needed to know, this made my job much easier even though I had to work remotely due to COVID-19.

Daily Life

Jordan has closed its border, so I had to change to a remote internship. This was a disappointment because I could not experience Jordan in person, but the benefits of a remote internship are flexibility and the fact that I could carry out work in an environment I am most familiar with. I planned my work and meetings ahead, and I sent questions via emails or video chats. In my spare time I just relaxed and met friends like during term times in Oxford.

Lasting Impressions

I think I pretty much enjoyed the experience because I was given a challenge.

William Gasson, St Edmund Hall, Final Year Undergraduate, Remote Working

Work Projects

I applied to work for Ummiah, a Jordanian communications company expecting to learn about the communications industry and get an idea of what it would be like to work for a technology company; as well as the opportunity to go to Jordan to experience life and work in another country, however, due to the global health crisis this was no longer an option so Umniah kindly offered to make the internship remote. The internship took a few days to get going properly due to having to deal with the realities of working from home, however, once it was started I was given projects to do which meant I could get on with work and there was a wide enough scope that I could always find a bit to work on.

My internship was split into 2 parts, the first was based around Umniah’s IT and Development operations group which focused on full stack web development so looking at front end, back end and testing. My main task was to look at how caching can be used to speed up request time, which was interesting and allowed me to learn a lot about web development.

The second part of the internship was with the digital transformation and data analytics group which focused how google analytics is used in business to monitor how new customers find your website, how they behave on the website, and what things they buy. This allows you to see which parts of your website are working effectively, working in this area gave me a much clearer idea of how analytics are used online.

Daily Life

Working from home the hours I was required to do were reduced when it was moved to a remote internship. This meant I had to do 20 hours of work over the week, I could therefore spread these hours out across the week to work when it fitted my schedule best. I found because I was working from home there was no commuting and so there were plenty of hours in the day to complete the work set and do other bit and bobs such as reading around my project for next year. As there was not much to do during lockdown it was good to have projects to work on and feel I was actually making some productive use of the time.

Outside work I have always found exercising a good way to relax and take my mind off whatever is going on. This was particularly relevant in lock down as a good way to not feel

as cooped up was to go for a run or cycle in order to get out of the house and get some fresh air. This also allowed me to break up the day and spread my working hours out.

Lasting Impressions

I will clearly remember 2020 for a number of reasons, but I will have a good impression of my internship and the skills it helped me gain. I really enjoyed the experience of working for Umniah as I learnt a lot of principles which should be applicable to my career. It also allowed me to feel productive during a period of time in which I feel I would have done very little with otherwise.

I learnt a lot from my time at Umniah and feel like a much more confident coder and would know have to knowledge to create a website, track how it is used and from that optimise aspects of it to give the user the best experience. There are many skills I learnt from this internship and it gave me an opportunity to see the tools that are used in industry and talk to people who work in communications.