By Idiris Abdullahi

During my internship at Optum, I had the opportunity to work on a scrum team. A scrum team is a group of people who work together to deliver products, and there are three main parts of any scrum team. First is the product owner, who is the messenger to the business that is receiving a product. The product owner works together with the scrum team to make sure that the client is receiving what they asked for. Next is the scrum master, who is the leader of the scrum team. The scrum master is there to make sure the team is being efficient with their time. The final part of the team is the developers, who are the people developing the product by coding. All of the Genesys Works interns on my team are developers, but we all also got a chance to be a scrum master. Throughout the year, my team worked on and learned from several projects.

Personal and Team Blog on Github

As a scrum team, we need a place to record what we have accomplished so that when we look back, we have something to show for it. To do this, we decided to make personal and team blogs on Github. To learn about Github, one of our buddy mentors, Josh, helped us set up an Optum Github account and taught us about git commands

My experience blogging taught me that it is important to record what you do so that later on, you can reference it for future jobs. It is also helpful to record my progress because I can see much I have accomplished and grown. When I look back at what I’ve done throughout my internship, it makes me proud.

Tips Project

A large project that our scrum team got to work on was the Tips Project. The Tips Project will help patients and doctors log their health concerns and help doctors organize their patients’ data. For this project, we learned about SQL, NodeJS, React, and MongoDB.

I found learning new coding languages to be challenging because one mistake could mean a whole line of code doesn’t work. It taught me to be patient when learning something new. You’re not going to get everything right away, but if you keep pushing yourself, it will pay off.

Counter and Timer App

To get a good understanding of React (a JavaScript library), our team was paired up with a buddy mentor named Adeeb. With React, we were able to make two basic, but cool, apps. The first app that we created was the Counter App, which allowed us to get a good understanding of React and Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code or VS code is a source-code editor developed by Microsoft. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control and GitHub, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring.

What I Learned

While there were some obstacles, I’ve learned a lot at my Optum internship. While I discovered my passion lies within marketing, I’ve gained so much from internship role in technology. Working in a team caused me to grow because everyone was responsible for each other. I had to learn to not only look out for myself but my teammates, as well. I’ve also met some great people at Optum who have a lot of experience. They can be connections in the future who I can turn to for help and guidance. I am excited about my future and all of the potential opportunities!

About the Writer

My name is Idiris Abdullahi, and I am a senior at Southwest High School. After high school, I will be attending the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and majoring in marketing. My hobbies include playing on Ps4 with my friends, basketball, and sleeping. My favorite food of all time has to be pineapple pizza, and yes, pineapple deserves to be on pizza. I joined Genesys Works because of my interest in technology.