University of Auckland
Bachelor of Engineering with Honours | Biomedical Engineering
My internship helped me focus on what I was studying in terms of which parts are more important for the industry
Jae Min discovered Tidy via LinkedIn during his third year of university. After doing some research on the company, he sent in an internship application.
While the engineering internship positions were already full for that period, he was put on a priority list for future internships and secured a position the following year.
"Tidy reached out to me as a past applicant and I had an interview with the dev team and CEO, then I got the role."
Jae Min was brought on as a frontend engineer intern during the winter break.
During his internship, Jae Min worked on small features in Tidy's new product and made alterations to the frontend.
"I helped to change up the user interface so people have an easier time using Tidy on a day-to-day basis. At first, I was assigned easy tasks to get used to the workflow and the languages. Once I got more used to the technologies, I started to find bugs by myself and pick up feature requests on the sprint board."
Having completed other internships previously, Jae Min said that Tidy stood out in several ways:
"There was a lot of flexibility. Working from home, I was able to work around my own schedule, while still being able to go to the office once a week. The team was really friendly too which was a pleasant surprise. They were also quite young, so I was able to relate to everyone more."
At university, Jae Min's experience with coding were more related to data optimisation than building a software product, so his internship showed him something new.
"I was used to crunching numbers and solving pre-defined problems. These problems typically have defined answers, but I found that it's much more open-ended in industry. I really enjoyed the creative freedom and the open-endedness.
Knowing what the industry is like allowed me to have a better focus at uni because I had a better understanding of what's most important in the things being taught and what's less relevant."
