Learning Outside the Classroom

This summer, The New York Times hosted our inaugural technology internship program. Jean Kim, one of the interns in the program, shares her experience.

As a fine arts major starting an internship with a team of developers at The New York Times, I envisioned myself spending the summer making t-shirts, stickers and the occasional website mock-up. While I had an interest in programming and had been told my role would be more “UX engineer” than “graphic designer,” I still assumed that I would only be doing design work while the much smarter, more capable developers took care of the rest.

Fortunately, I was completely wrong.

Let me back up for a second: I was a fine arts major in college. We’re talking drawing classes, color theory, graphic design and typography. Sophomore year, I decided to try my hand at coding, since I’ve always been a tech geek. My first computer science class, Intro to Java Programming, went so well that I was convinced that I might really have a future as a developer.

Enter Java Programing II, which started with half-a-semester of OCaml. Everyone else in the class picked it up without any problems. I, on the other hand, spent many late nights miserably trying to get my code to compile (object-oriented what â€" who’s doing the orienting?) while seriously reassessing my level of intelligence. It was a rough semester. After a dismal first midterm grade, I ended up dropping the class, tail between my legs, and going back to teaching myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

So imagine my surprise when on my first day at The Times, I was told to take this experience and make what I wanted of it. That is, I could do as much or as little coding as I wanted. I met UX strategists, designers-turned-coders and experts in everything web-related, all of whom generously offered their time and expertise to me as I took on some web design and development projects.

One of my first assignments was a simple JavaScript animation â€" a bubbling beaker for the Open Source Science Fair. I was given a book on Flash animation, an introduction to raphael.js and instructions to “go for it.” After two hours of intense reading and confusion, I managed to create a single, static bubble. By the end of the second day, I had a functioning animation. Overwhelmed with excitement, I presented my final product. Very soon after, one of the developers kindly pointed out that the bubbles were never clearing from the DOM. My little beaker was creating infinite bubbles and devouring memory â€" oops.

Thankfully, shortly before my very first deploy, I experienced my very first code review. A group of NYTimes JavaScript experts quickly solved my problem, while reassuring me that they understood the reasoning behind my coding decisions.

In my undergraduate classes, students were let loose with an “everyone for themselves” attitude. We did our own work, finished our own projects and, when we didn’t understand something, we failed (looking at you, computer science midterm). At The Times, however, you’re never left to work alone; even when you’re focusing on your own project, you can always find someone willing to collaborate and contribute. The designers and developers that I worked with this summer all had a genuine interest in helping me succeed â€" encouraging me to be independent but offering to help along the way. Learning so much outside of the classroom has been an exciting and rewarding experience, and I could not have asked for a better place to spend my first summer out of college.