Internships at Precocity Part 1: How it Started

When our team sat down to determine how we could best contribute to the development of the next generation of technologists by establishing our internship program, we had to think through what we could do to make the experience unique to Precocity. Just like the techies of tomorrow, our team loves solving problems and experimenting with new technologies too and we have more fun when we’re trying out new things. It’s why our clients come to us with their most complex challenges, it’s why the best and brightest come to work for us, and it’s core to our culture. We are tinkerers, we love making the complex simple, and that is the experience we wanted to provide to our interns.

Rather than going for the first applicants straight out of school, we decided it would be best to get to know potential candidates first. The question was where do we find college students who are just like us? As part of our outreach, we decided to sponsor HackDFW, a large annual hackathon that is open to students and professionals, in hopes of getting our name out to internship candidates. We had several members of our team at the hackathon and they even ended up helping teams as they raced the clock against to finish their hacks, and that’s where we met them, our interns Ali and Yuriy! It began with the two of them running over to our table asking for help with an issue they were having getting their app to run on Node.js, which led to two members of our team staying late into the evening to help them with a short break for sleep before the deadline.

After the Hackathon, our team raved about how much fun it was and you could clearly see the excitement in Ali and Yuriy as well. We knew we had to find a way to bring them on as our first interns for the summer.

We wanted Ali and Yuriy to have the best internship experience possible while also experiencing what it is like to work with our clients and work as a team towards a project. This would include all aspects of working on a project, including management of deadlines and dealing red tape so they could see what being a consultant was really like. We also wanted them to have a variety of experience, and therefore decided to have them work on two different projects for two of our clients, both 6 weeks each. This included going on site at each client and working side by side with our consultants. We assigned them each a mentor for each project for support and provided a quick orientation on the first day.

They did a phenomenal job and were highly loved and revered by our teams and our clients. Following the completion of their internship, we presented one of the projects that they had worked to our client and it was decided that we were to continue the work due to the great progress they had made. Ali and Yuriy were wonderful to work with and were able to capture the Precocity spirit at our client sites. They excelled in everything they worked on and our clients were thrilled.

At the end of the internship, we sat down with Ali and Yuriy to get their overall feedback and recommendations for future interns. They had some great opinions and suggestions for the future which we will plan to put into place for our next internships.

The internship program was a huge success, we would love to have Ali, and Yuriy come work for us full time once they graduate. We are very excited for next year’s interns and we look forward to taking what we have learned and putting it into practice it next year.