Here’s the story of how an engineer who specialized strictly in Java back end was able to pump out a fully functional site in six weeks.
I met some of the Semgeeks crew at a career fair my junior year in college. I was skeptical about taking on a web development internship at first, but the short interaction with the team was awesome, so I reconsidered.
I never thought I would branch into the web development world. I didn’t know anything about it, and I have to admit I was pretty intimidated by it. My mentor at Semgeeks, James Wolff, didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he threw me into the deep end so I could learn web dev techniques from experience, occasionally answering questions when I got stuck. Wolff was my mentor, but all of the guys on the web development floor were extremely helpful. They answered all my questions without hesitation. We joked a lot, and I felt like I had been working with them for months. It was an awesome environment for growth, and grow I did.
Prior to this internship, I had no idea what SEO was and how you could optimize a business with it. I coded in strictly Java my first three years at Monmouth University, so the front end stuff threw me off a bit. I can definitely say that learning front end at Semgeeks enhanced my back end skills.
Throughout my six weeks at Semgeeks, I learned JavaScript, JQuery, HTML, PHP, and CSS. I also learned how to pull data from an API and present it how I wanted. In six weeks! And that wasn’t all–the CEO, Chris Delany, let me sit in on prospective client calls so I could learn the process of requirement gathering and closing in on potential clients.
About a year and a half after the internship, the things I learned at Semgeeks are still with me, propelling me forward in life. I was able to secure my first job out of college because of the web development skills I learned here. Those skills also enabled me to be the web development lead for a side project I’m working on.
My time at Semgeeks was awesome. Yeah, school is dope, but you have to leave your comfort zone and enter your respective industry to see if it’s really what you love. Semgeeks assured me that I made the right decision. Given the chance, I’d do it all over again!
