Burak Adam Internship at Vensure Employment Services

Burak interned with Vensure Employment Services, previously Avitus Group, over the Fall semester of 2021. He worked as a full time onsite intern at the company’s Billings, MT office. Vensure Employment Services is a PEO(Professional Employer Organization) company and provides payroll processing, human resources, accounting and legal consultation services. Burak’s main projects involved data mapping and manipulation in C#, writing applications to interface with SQL databases, API related development and coding, and occasionally some IT work related with trouble shooting. Vensure is a fast growing company with its acquisitions of smaller companies. Integration of all these different companies that are working with different database systems and engines is the most challenging part of software development in the company.

Burak found this Internship valuable since he needed to use several different Developer tools, got familiar with several different systems and applications, and learned about implementing and testing API’s to integrate different application software. The company has different offices in 50 states and South America this gave Burak the chance to experience working with remote and international teams. Burak will be graduating after this internship and he was able to get a full time job offer from Vensure Employer Services following his graduation.

Rebecka Lester Internship at Montana Bureau of Mines & Geology (MBMG)

Rebecka interned with MBMG over the summer of 2021 and into the continuing school year. She worked as a research assistant under Luke Buckley, a Data Scientist with the Bureau. Rebecka’s main projects involved working with the teams involved in the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative project (Earth MRI) — an MBMG/USGS funded project to identify critical minerals, and the MBMG Data Preservation Program — designing effective software products to deliver historic mining and mineral data to the public. To this end, she was responsible for interviewing field professionals, developing effective database structures, public web applications, and data-protection procedures to create text-based and map-based web applications.

This internship gave Rebecka an insight and appreciation for the vast mining history Montana has, as well as, a greater understanding of the enormous team effort it takes to provide information to the public. Overall, Rebecka is grateful for the opportunity to work with professionals across many different fields and to explore the database development field firsthand.

Jessa Steele Interns at Zoot Enterprises

Jessa Steele, now a Sophomore in computer science and mathematics, worked as an intern at Zoot Enterprises during the Summer of 2021 and her contract was extended into the school year as a remote employee. She worked at Zoot’s main office in Bozeman, MT as part of Zoot’s Microservices department. She and three other interns were assigned to build and work on Data Providers for Zoot’s clients in Zoot’s very own software program, WebRules Builder. These Data Providers took anywhere from 30-200+ hours to develop depending on the size, documentation, and complexity of each individual one. Building these Data Providers required computer science logic that had been developed through courses at Montana Tech, as well as profound communication skills between other interns and co-workers at Zoot. This job sometimes even required communication across different Zoot departments for various reasons. This internship allowed Jessa to take the computer science logic she had learned and use it to learn new software development strategies and expand on her current skill set. It helped her widen her communication skills; she was able to familiarize herself with strategic communication in a professional environment. It was a great learning experience for Jessa, especially coming out of her freshman year, to get first-hand experience, further her skills, and make invaluable memories with other interns that excite her for the future in this field.

Chase Farrar Interned at Pactera Technology for Microsoft

Chase Farrar is a senior in Computer Science at Montana Tech. He was an intern at Pactera Technology Ltd working on a team at Microsoft during the Summer of 2021. He worked remotely from home due to Microsoft’s campus being closed because of the pandemic. Pactera is one of the world’s top 5 RDS service providers. They are an IT consulting and outsourcing company.

He was given the opportunity to join an Office 365 Security and Compliance team. The project he was tasked with working on was a project to detect email spoofing when new emails were registered and alert the original domain owner. This project required him to employ memory and resource management techniques as the algorithm that compared emails ran billions of times every day. He was also given an opportunity to work on the front end of the project and add the project to existing code. Unfortunately, the Fall semester began before the project could be completed but was completed shortly after.  The team at Microsoft was very helpful and made the interns feel comfortable despite the difficult projects they were tasked with. Overall, Chase gained an immense amount of experience and confidence over the 12 weeks at Pactera and Microsoft

Brandon Mitchell, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in Pullman, WA

During the summer of 2021, Brandon Mitchell had the chance to intern with Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories at their headquarters in Pullman, Washington.  While there, Brandon worked on a team with a few others to improve and add features to an internal tool called Nydus.  This tool was used to run various tests in parallel to hopefully speed up the process of building source code.  Brandon mostly worked in C#, JavaScript, and Powershell and gained experience working with front- and back-end development.  Brandon enjoyed the atmosphere of the company, the people he met (many of whom were Montana Tech alumni), and the free Friday lunches.