Over the summer of 2013, Montana Tech computer science and software engineering students interned at a wide variey of companies, from Microsoft in Seattle, to Echostar in Colorado, and to PPL Electrical Utilities in Pennsylvania. If a student enrolls in the Internship course, we asked them to share their internship experiences on the Computer Science Department website. Make sure to read the entire article and return for additional internships as students submit their reports. Articles about Jon Wareham, Jeff Hall, PJ Neary, Brian Knopp, Haythem Memmi, Ben Butcher, Reid Alford, Cade Foster, and Clint Hillerman are below.
Jon Wareham interned at PPL Electrical Utilites corporate headquarters in Allentown, Pennsylvania. During the internship, he worked with the dot net framework to utilize data base design, process monitoring, and application development. The applications Jon developed were used by company day traders to predict the future prices of energy in certain regions of the United States and improve profit margins when buying and selling energy shares. Jon had the opportunity to work with the Team Foundation Server feature of Visual Studio, which provided version control for him and his coworkers when working on the same project. The primary languages he worked with were C#, WPF, and SQL using stored procedures.
In addition to the programming experience, Jon and the other 120 PPL interns were invited to dozens of "networking events" where the interns could talk with corporate executives and learn more about every aspect of the company and the global power industry it operates in. Each intern was tasked with interviewing at least 2 full time employees in one of the 5 different company branches outside of their own. Jon interviewed the President of Energy Supply and PPL Generation, the President of PPL Renewable Energy, and the Chief Information Officer among others.