Section 2.0 - About the Job
Section 2.1 - Employer
Northrop Grumman is one of the largest defense contractors in the United States. They have employees all over the United States, as well as many other foreign countries. Northrop Grumman is divided into several sections; the section I worked under is Information Technology (IT). In the past few years, Northrop has acquired many smaller companies. One of these is called TASC, and this is the portion of the company I worked under. The TASC section of Northrop Grumman is fairly large, and is based in Chantilly, Virginia.
The office I worked in was located in Fairfax, Virginia. It is about an hour commute with light traffic from my house, but can easily take an hour and a half to two in heavy traffic. I worked forty hours a week for the entire summer. My schedule was somewhat flexible, as long as I worked forty hours each week. Many weeks I would work nine or ten hour days and take a half-day off on Friday. Because I live so far away and traffic is so bad, I usually went into the office at six in the morning, and left around two in the afternoon. This was not the typical work schedule of most of my co-workers; most of them didn't get in until nine. Many times I would be the second or third person in the office. I grew to like it this way. It would be quieter, and I could get a lot of my work done early in the morning. My immediate group consisted of about twenty-five employees, ranging from technical writers to software developers.
I worked on a very small project, with two other men, who were co-project leads. Our task, which was a subset of a very large project, had a timeline of four months. This worked perfectly with my summer schedule. My office mate, also one of the project leads, was my mentor and he was in charge of giving me assignments and answering most of my questions. My supervisor was the program manager of the larger main project. He was responsible for signing my time card, filling out any intern information and forms, and making sure everything was going smoothly throughout the summer.
The pace of our project was very fast; we had a lot to do in a very short period of time. Sometimes, it almost seemed impossible to get it all done. My typical workweek involved about thirty-eight to thirty-nine hours of software development and usually an hour or two for software developer's meetings. These meetings were fairly short, an hour at most, and were held once or twice a week. During the meetings, ten developers got together and discussed problems they had encountered, interesting things they had found, the current status of each portion of the project, and ideas for future improvement or research and development. The meetings were usually informal and gave the developers a chance to joke around with each other. I was the only intern and was also the only female developer on the team, but the rest of the developers treated me well and made me feel accepted. This included being the target of several good spirited practical jokes, which I returned in like kind.
Section 2.2 - Your Job
My first summer at TASC, I was hired as a junior software engineer/developer to develop applications using C/C++. The second summer, they asked me if I would be willing to learn a new language, C#. This also meant learning about the .NET development environment, as we were using Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET. It was very interesting, I have always loved trying new and different things, including learning new languages. My project consisted of building a custom application for Pocket PC's using Visual Studio .NET 2003. In addition, I designed and developed graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the project. These user interfaces had to be well thought out, neat, and easy to use. This was the perfect task for me, since I have had a lot of experience designing user interfaces from previous internships and I really enjoy it. I also had to write and read XML data to and from files using the XML services from the .NET class libraries. Another project that I had while interning this year, was writing a memo explaining the status of my progress and the work remaining. For this memo, I had to create UML diagrams and exercise my technical writing skills. Writing is not something I enjoy greatly, but strong technical writing skills are a must in the field of software development.
Several times during the summer, our project team held demos to show the client our progress. These sessions would often run for hours, with many questions and comments about the functionality of our system. Luckily, all our demos went without incident, but caused great stress to us while preparing and presenting the demonstration. During the demos, several of us needed to keep track of the modifications suggested by the client, which involved utilizing note taking and organizational skills. This summer was different than my past internships because I actually got to see an immature concept evolve into a fully functioning system.