“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”
– Arthur Ashe

An internship is a journey for you to learn, to apply your knowledge, to fail, and finally to achieve your goals and celebrate success. I am proud of myself that I am able to make an effort to learn new technologies quickly and keep the attitude of never giving up. I continue to learn, to research on solutions to certain technical issues and try to solve them during my internship. It is a great way to learn and to practice.

Problem-solving on the Job

During the past two weeks of my internship, I encountered some technical difficulties for the project that I am working on – an online database web application. I was able to write SQL statements and embedded them into ASP code that would select records from Microsoft SQL Server database. However, the details of each record could not be displayed on the following web page.

I spent a lot of time trying to diagnose this issue, but no matter how I try, it wouldn’t display the information. I thought my SQL query was wrong as I looked into it, turned out it wasn’t. Then, I figured it was probably something wrong with the server-side language, ASP – a language I newly picked up during the internship. I tried to modify my ASP code again and again. The moment when the web page finally displays the detail record data, I was so delighted. It certainly was a milestone for me and I shared this good news with my stakeholders.

An internship is a great way to learn practical knowledge and gain troubleshooting experiences that you may not able to learn from just school. I really like how I learned ASP – the server-side technology I am currently working with. I enjoy how it is an old technology that Microsoft developed, but it’s still very powerful. It can create many dynamic legacy web pages and let them access web servers and databases. During the process of learning new technologies, some websites definitely helped me greatly, including w3school.com, stackoverflow.com, Microsoft Developer Network, and, of course, Google.

Thinking Outside of the Box

Something I learned from the iSchool also helped me to go along with the internship – thinking outside of the box. When you run into a problem, spend some time to analyze it and research for solutions, but do not drill into the problem too much. Sometimes it helps to give it some thought beyond the problem. Think creatively and then you will probably have some new approaches. Thinking out of the box is indeed an important thing I learned.

What’s next? I will continue my journey, to work on my internship project and try to make the final product of our web application perfect. Hopefully it will also be easy to maintain and update by Kodak. Success is a journey, and I look forward to seeing what I can accomplish throughout it.