Meet Oliver, Engineer Intern at FactSet
School:
The Rochester Institute of Technology
Major:
Game Development and Design
Why I Chose to Intern at FactSet:
During the on-site interviews, I met people that would often express that they found their work gratifying, they felt valued, and that they enjoyed themselves and each other. By the end of the process, Ifound evidence that FactSet really cared about maintaining an excellent work environment. It was this healthy corporate culture that drew me to FactSet.
How has your experience been as a FactSet intern?
FactSet engineering interns are allowed to select which project they work on. Throughout the project proposals session, I kept a running list of projects that I found interesting. I couldn’t choose which project I liked the most, until the final project presentation came around.
On its surface, it seemed like a standard intern project. Project managers often allow the intern to choose which language and framework they would develop the project in, but this one had an exception. The presenter made a point to forbid development using NodeJS, a common server technology, as a matter of principle. I was taken aback, I had developed the majority of my projects in Node, so for someone to have a visceral aversion to it got me interested. I asked questions like ‘Why not Node?’ and ‘What would you use?’. We developed a conversation where we both challenged each other’s assumptions to emerge better developers afterwards. At the after party, the presenter, who is now my boss, and I continued our conversation, discussing the needs and problems that languages and frameworks must face and how to solve them. The conversation continues to this day.
In discussing our various internships, my friends shared how they had to fight for attention and compete for status, and to their conversation of competition I had nothing to add. One of the things I appreciate most about my intern work at FactSet is the atmosphere of cooperation. Everyone was extremely willing to give me advice and technical help, and even provide a friendship that went beyond work.