For my first work term as part of my undergraduate co-op program, I spent four months working in Winnipeg, Manitoba at The Wawanesa Insurance Company on the Web Content Management Team as an Application Developer. Wawanesa is the largest mutual insurance company in Canada and has recently been growing in California, Oregon, and Las Vegas. They are a company with a vibrant history on the west coast founded in strong community morals.
‘I learned so much about so much and experienced so much more’
Since this was my first real work experience it came with a lot of learning, surprising bureaucracy and firsts. I was quick to realize that despite having had four coding classes, I have never really gone through the processes required for coding in the real world. I learned how to use source control, set up environments, interact with servers, run builds on Jenkins, manage tickets and task flow in Jira, add documentation, etc. . . None of these tasks were particularly difficult or cumbersome on their own but when trying to learn all the particular lingo, logins and corporate-specific workflows all while trying not to look like a fool, it gets tiring. My advice for anyone going into their first workplace, or for that matter any new workplace, is to make friends with a junior developer on your team that you can go to for those small reminders you need. This way you can avoid inconveniencing your boss/supervisor all the time and start to develop other relationships within your team. In addition, this junior developer is the most likely to have recently gone through this new arrival situation.
Within a week, I was going headfirst into the code not knowing where to go or even what to look for. All of my coding projects from school had at most four files and definitely no folder structure, but now I was looking at a repository with subfolders in subfolders and a system with layers on layers. It took some getting used to for me to finally be able to navigate around the code: following a request from the frontend Java Serverlet Page, through the integration layer, system layer, process layer and finally into the database. Debugger and Chrome Developer Tools quickly became a friend I never knew I had.
As the term progressed I got more comfortable with my team and started to take on more challenging tasks. I worked on a large initiative called the Anual Mileage Questionnaire (AMQ) that required me to create a feature that would send the necessary customers an email with a link to our website. Once on the website, they would be able to update the mileage for all the cars on their policy. This took a lot of organization, coordination, and code. After this, I worked on adding a payment feature to the website that would utilize Morgan Chase Paymentech Portal to allow users to pay their insurance bills online.
Finally, in the last few weeks of my term, I got very involved in the company’s content management system, dotCMS. This software was very neglected and misunderstood by the organization. It was a tool that developers tried to dismiss quickly after they arrived at the company but also a tool that analysts didn’t quite understand. As a result, the usage and structure of the content was in disarray. I decided to take the initiative to try and sort out the mess and get a proper grasp of the tool. Using my growing unique skill set with this tool I developed the french website for Wawanesa Life. Before I left I made sure to document my work and give multiple presentations to both business people and developers about how dotCMS should be optimally leveraged and maintained going forward.
However, there was more than just technical experience that came along with this placement. I was able to foster close friendships and working relationships with many of my diverse colleagues. As a team, we represented 11 different home countries and surprisingly, I was the only member of the team born in Canada. Luckily, I learned a lot about other parts of the world, unique experiences and stories, and also gain a greater appreciation for the great country that I live in. In addition, I gained insight into various bureaucratic/corporate procedures. My department went through a very rough operational crisis. In this time many people were fired, safety mechanisms were put in place, and teams were rearranged. I got shuffled through four different teams, 3 supervisors and 2 directors. This helped me learn how to get my feet settled quickly in order to stay productive amidst the turmoil.
Overall this experience in Winnipeg was wonderful. I learned so much about so much and experienced so much more 🙂