Maptek internships ‘invaluable’ for budding engineers
Thursday, February 15th, 2018
The Maptek summer internship program has given a group of aspiring software engineers experience operating in professional teams, working with different code bases and finding solutions to real-world challenges.
Hope Lee, Andrew Memma and Hamish Pratt began working with the Eureka exploration software development team in Adelaide in November and Jason Dodd’s internship primarily focused on the Sentry stability monitoring system.
Maptek Adelaide summer interns Andrew Memma, Jason Dodd, Hamish Pratt and Hope Lee with Maptek Head of Development, Core Technologies, Anthony Gibbs (centre).
Computer Science graduate Hope has now secured a full-time job working on Evolution strategic mine scheduling software.
‘The chance to learn about Maptek’s procedures during my internship helped a lot when I started working with the Evolution team,’ Hope said.
‘It was a great experience being able to work on a real project, implementing features that will be used by people in the future.’
University of Adelaide Software Engineering student Andrew said his internship was invaluable.
‘The internship has been nothing short of a brilliant experience,’ he said.
Jason, Andrew, Hamish and Hope learning from Anthony.
‘The working culture is nurturing and encouraging, and the nature of the work I’m doing continues to intrigue me whilst providing a healthy challenge.
‘Switching from developing small-scale university assignments to contributing to a code base that is orders of magnitude larger has resulted in a change in my perception of coding standards for the better.’
Fellow Software Engineering student Hamish relished the chance to contribute to ongoing Maptek development.
‘It’s given me the experience of working in a large organisation where my code simply isn’t a personal project for myself or a four week university assignment that I won’t look at again,’ Hamish said.
‘It’s taught me about the steps of writing better, more practical code that has a place in a product.
‘I never felt like I was just simply an intern, which definitely motivated me a lot to put all my effort in making the project something that I would be proud of.’
Jason, who also studies Software Engineering, applied for the position to put the skills he has learnt in three years at university to the test.
‘Working in a team on a real piece of software to eventually become part of a real product has been a great experience,’ Jason said.
‘The biggest challenge has been the leap from simple university projects to adding features to a large existing code base.
‘It has been an incredible experience both for educational reasons and personal.
‘It has been enjoyable to put my studies into practice and work with a great team of people.’
Maptek has a long-standing commitment to working with universities to prepare students for their careers.
You can read more about Maptek University Partnerships here: www.maptek.com/university
