My three months internship with outreachy has finally come to an end. It feels so surreal, I can't help but be grateful to the Outreachy organizers for such a wholesome learning experience. In the first few weeks of my internship, I suffered a lot of impostor syndrome, I felt like I wouldn't be able to deliver on my tasks, in my mind I thought, this internship is for people with pro-level experience regardless of the internship title attached to the program. Guess what!! It wasn't. My mentor encouraged and reassured me that the Outreachy internship is an open-source internship that encourages learning and growth, the organizers and mentors do not expect you to be an expert.
Lessons from my internship:
During the course of my internship, I learned a lot about API consumption (GET, POST, CRUD, DELETE). I worked on consuming a hospital endpoint that required me to fetch a list of all hospitals in the database and also search for specific hospitals. I created screens to aid better user experience and finally, I worked on the notification feature of the Mboacare app, such that users can receive notifications, view notification details and delete notifications. All these greatly honed my problem-solving skills, I encountered a couple of challenges along the way, but I was able to solve them, by seeking answers from Google and stackOverflow and also with the help of my mentor and good friends.
As an Outreachy intern, I have learned how to better receive feedback, there were times I felt so uneasy after delivering a certain task and I would be asked to refurbish and refactor certain features, in the beginning, it was a little challenging but as time passed, I got used to it. Learning how to take feedback as a team member and collaborating with people from different technical backgrounds is key to promoting growth, harmony, and efficiency.
At times I wonder what I would have done without all the uplifting emails from Outreachy. The emails always came at the right time, and they brought me a sense of bliss, calm, and support each time. The emails made me believe more in my capabilities. In a particular mail, Omotola (an Outreachy organizer) stated that my contribution to my project during the contribution phase is proof that I deserved my place as an Outreachy intern. It gave me the boost I needed.
Another beautiful part of my internship with Outreachy was the informal chats we had every fortnight. Here, we discussed different topics ranging from ways to contribute to open source, to networking, adding value to the open-source ecosystem, and effective communication skills. In these chats, interns could connect, share challenges, and seek ways to resolve them together. I always looked forward to these chats. They were a safe-haven for me.
My core values and how it helped me during my internship:
Do you remember the core values I wrote about in one of my earliest blog posts? Growth, learning, and openness, these values shaped a huge part of my experience with Outreachy. I have learned much more than I had expected. Sometime in week four of my internship, I was to deliver on a task, but I encountered a bug that seemed not to be going away, I couldn't bring my myself to ask my mentor for help because I felt that would portray a lack of competence. I searched and searched for solutions on Stack Overflow and Google, but I couldn't seem to find any. This task was to be delivered in 3 days, but it lingered up until the 6th day. It was on the 6th day that I opened up to my mentor about the challenge that I was facing. She said, “when you are stuck never hesitate to reach out, this is a learning program”. I felt more at ease after reaching out to my mentor. Openness was how I was able to fix a bug that was troubling me. This also taught me the importance of asking for help when needed. Always reach out for help when you need it.
Looking back on my internship, my contributions, and the sense of fulfillment that it has given me, I would love to continue contributing to the open-source ecosystem. There is so much to give and so much value to create. I just love open-source.
Thank you, dear reader, for being a part of my journey.
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