This summer four talented students joined Comminus team for a six-week internship. During that time, they collaborated with their mentor Marko Marjanović, Application Development Consultant in Comminus, and other employees on a real-life project. In this blog post you can see their thoughts about their experience in Comminus.
Every year Comminus offers an opportunity to a few talented students to spend few weeks with us on a summer internship. This enables them to apply their knowledge gained at university to concrete project and problems. This year, four students spent six weeks working with us: Katarina, Lovre and Tomislav who attend Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb and Kristijan who attends Faculty of Organization and Informatics in Varaždin. During their time with us, in collaboration with their mentor Marko Marjanović (Application Development Consultant) they developed potential solution how our employees can get in the company office even without their entry card! Here are their thoughts on their experience in Comminus.
What did you think about Comminus summer internship? Describe to us what was the task at hand.
Kristijan
The Summer internship was great. We were a team of four students and we developed a system that consisted of the web application and the IoT part that was developed using Raspberry Pi 3. We got familiar with the Microsoft Azure platform witch I think is great and can be used for a lot of projects. I already have ideas what I can further develop with the knowledge gained during the internship. Mostly, the whole point of our task was that a worker who is coming to work no longer needs to have an entry card. Instead, there would be a camera that is connected to Raspberry Pi witch takes a picture of the employee, after that the system automatically recognizes who he or she is and if he recognizes the worker the door opens and the arrival time is recorded. A web application serves to administer a worker, or to add new and necessary images to identify a specific worker.
What are the advantages of learning during summer internship / Why do you think it is a good idea to go to an internship?
Katarina
I think student internship is extremely important because it prepares students to enter the business world. It is invaluable to have this opportunity to work on a real-life project and with the technologies that until now I have not been able to use. Also, it is great for a student to see how real IT workplace looks like.
Kristijan
I think summer internship is a great way to see how it looks like to work in a real company. To see how you can apply knowledge gained at school to real projects and at the same time expand your technology knowledge.
Lovre
It is good idea to do a student internship so you can gain work experience in the business environment in the specific area of your desired career path. In addition, you are able to get familiar with the business process of a company and you get to see how it is to be that company employee. Internship offers an opportunity to get in touch with technologies that are not part of the standard university program, but while working on a real-life project you can also see how important your education background really is. Lastly, summer internship is a chance to experience working in a multidisciplinary team and realize the importance of team work in solving a problem.
Tomislav
Internship is a good way to get familiar with work organization in IT industry. You can see that in practice the focus is on the product, not so much on theory, but it assumes good knowledge of it.
Why did you apply for this internship?
Katarina
I signed up after I met Comminus team at JobFair. I liked their idea for a summer project because it was an opportunity to develop a system that unites both Machine Learning and IoT, which was something I was very interested in. Also, I had a desire to test my current knowledge gained through college and get a chance to expand it.
Kristijan
I decided to sign up for Comminus internship during Career week at my faculty. I visited their workshop witch was great and spoke with the representatives of the company and after that I decided to sign up.
Lovre
I signed up for the internship because I liked the idea that our project would connect machine learning with IoT.
Tomislav
I signed up because until now I have not had an opportunity to work in any company and also because soon I would like to be employed by this or similar company.
To whom would you recommend summer internship in Comminus?
Katarina
I would recommend internship to all students who have the will and the desire to learn something new, supplement their knowledge from school and gain new and valuable experience.
Kristijan
All students who want to learn something new with super mentors.
Lovre
I would recommend the internship to anyone who is interested to work on a project and wants to work in a pleasant, ambitious and stimulating environment.
Tomislav
I would recommend internship in Comminus to all student programmers that want to work on projects that will ultimately be used. Feeling useful and implementing ideas instead of continuous theorization without obvious application (as in college) is worthy experience for every IT student.
What was your most difficult task during the whole internship?
Katarina
Hmm ... It's hard to pick one task as the toughest. Completing the task was difficult, but it was very valuable experience and now at the end of internship I do not have a bad memory of any part of it.
Kristijan
It is difficult to pick what was the most difficult! It was a lot of fun, so if something was too hard we asked our mentor to help and facilitate the process.
Lovre
The toughest task throughout the internship was to find out which Azure Clouds technologies can be implemented on Azure IoT Edge and how to run code on the Raspberry Pi device.
Tomislav
The hardest task was to face the reality - have I just lost (the first) three weeks of trying and trying to figure out how the problem can be solved, where to start, will we succeed- until we figured out a way to do the task at hand. It was little frustrating, but definitely worthy experience!
.JPG.aspx?width=600&height=399 "Kristijan presenting the solution to our employees")
Final thoughts from our Summer Interns
Katarina
I would like to point out the support we received from employees at our project presentation at the end of internship. It was very nice to see the turnout to the presentation even though it was Friday and the end of working hours, together with the attention and support that they provided us. Also, big thanks to our mentor Marko and everyone in the office because whenever we had a problem we could ask anyone in the office for help and it was always provided.
Tomislav
For me it was interesting to work on a project that was full of unexpected challenges. I really wanted to know how it is like to work on a “real” project, not just a practice one in college and I got that.
We at Comminus want to thank this year's Summer Interns on their effort and dedication on this project. We hope they learned a lot during their time in Comminus and that they will be able use that knowledge in the future.
Tags: face recognition, IoT, Microsoft Azure, Raspberry Pi, Summer Internship