Print Express

Matthew Widojo, Wadham College, Second Year Undergraduate, MEng Engineering, Remote Working

Work Projects

My Software Engineering internship with Print Express consisted of me working on one of their start-ups with other interns. The particular programme I worked on allows users to create their own web applications with minimal software engineering training. At first, we were taught skills through online courses and in-person mentoring by experienced software programmers on Javascript and other languages/packages so that we can assist the team with their work. We were given work alongside the learning and after some time we decreased the amount of learning so that we could get more work done.

With regards to the work itself, the interns were treated like regular software engineers. We were assigned subsections to do and we kept in constant contact with supervisors and the others in order to report on progress. Sometimes tasks would overlap and we would work with other developers and interns and I gained loads of experience from that. Personally, my tasks focused on the user interface. I made things intuitive for the user by allowing them to resize and select and drag components on the screen. I also worked with other segments of the design such as enabling user designs to respond to a variety of devices. The changes I made actually contributed to the final product and it is great to know that something you have done contributed to creating a massive project.

Daily Life

As an international student I don’t have a permanent place of residence in the UK outside of college, and as such, I spent most of the summer at a friend’s place in the UK to avoid the hassle of having to quarantine twice by travelling back to my country of origin.

Outside of the fact that I was working from home, the job really seemed like a full workday. We started each day with a video call and I generally kept in touch with my supervisors and other interns through Microsoft Teams. There are some benefits to working at home such as getting to wake up right before the job starts and right after the job ends being immediately free to do whatever I wanted to without worrying about transport. We also got to choose when to have our lunch break, I tended to have mine after a midday meeting.

There were also intern socials arranged at the end of Fridays and sometimes I would socialize with the other interns outside of work hours. We would talk and play games such as hangman and some other online flash games during these socials. Outside of work I tried to get out of the house often. Due to COVID, there really wasn’t much to do, so I tended to go on walks often and occasionally go to the local cafe. I have also tried to keep in touch with my college friends, either through video calls or online video games like the Wadham Minecraft server.

Lasting Impressions

I think that one of the biggest things the internship has done for me is to provide exposure to software engineering. I applied to this internship out of curiosity on what a career in software engineering would look like and really, I had no idea what it entailed. The internship has answered a lot of my questions about the field, and as a result of it, I have figured out that I really enjoy software engineering. I decided to apply to Oxford for a conventional engineering degree because I love solving problems and constructing things and I have learnt that Software Engineering utilizes a lot of problem-solving as well. Now I am definitely considering software engineering as one of the major options for my career in the future.

The internship has also given me many skills relevant to software engineering that I feel are applicable with other programming jobs or in other fields and I have definitely gained a lot by having an additional programming language with experience to add to my CV. Outside of that, I have also enjoyed working with the other developers during my internship.