As summer slowly comes to an end, and with the onset of autumn and new challenges ahead, it's a good time to reflect on the activities we've been involved in over the summer. This year, we kicked off the season by hosting Web Summer Camp in July for the first time, and we also completed another highly successful internship with talented young students. Read on to learn more about how it went and what both the students and their mentors had to say about the experience.
A bit about Netgen and the internship program
One of the lasting traditions that has been a part of Netgen for over 10 years is our summer internship program. This work consistently delivers outstanding results, and we are proud to highlight that as many as 20% of our employees began their careers at Netgen through this program.
The success of the summer internship lies in the mutual benefits it provides. For students, it's an excellent opportunity to gain hands-on experience in a real business environment and to enjoy the dynamics and challenges of teamwork. For us at Netgen, it serves as a chance to present our company and connect with potential future employees.
The internship typically takes place during July, and occasionally, our collaboration with the students extends into September. Beyond the well-organized work schedule, which follows a carefully crafted plan and program, we place great importance on another aspect of a real work environment: the involvement of students in informal gatherings with colleagues after work hours. These moments often foster new ideas and connections, as they frequently emerge over coffee and relaxed conversations.
A fine team of students and mentors
Our students come from diverse backgrounds, always bringing vibrancy to the Netgen office. This year, we had the opportunity to work with six students, most of whom came from FER, along with one student from the Faculty of Graphic Arts. This profile allowed us to cover various areas and roles in our internship program, including design (UX/UI), AI development (Python), frontend (React JS), and backend (Symfony) development.
While they arrived with a certain level of knowledge and skills, there is always room for further learning, especially when it comes to gaining real-world experience. In this context, the role of mentors is of crucial importance in the internship process. Throughout the entire duration of the internship, students’ work is guided, monitored and supervised by mentors who are experts in their respective fields.
Mentors take on the valuable role of guides, providing direction, motivation and transferring their knowledge and skills to the students. They also offer specific and constructive feedback on the students' activities. This ensures that students have a structured and organized experience, where they are not left to navigate on their own but instead receive comprehensive answers to their questions and clarifications.
Dogfooding - developing an AI tool we need
The internship was organized around improving the video e-learning solution developed during last year's internship. The main goal was to enhance the existing system with selected AI features.
CLMS (Company Learning Management System) is an internal tool that enables the creation of educational courses consisting of video lessons and quizzes used to check the attendee's progress through the course. Netgen maintains a repository of internal educational video recordings, and the primary idea behind CLMS is to facilitate internal learning and onboarding. As the amount of video material grew over the years to hundreds of recordings, we needed more data to search and consume the content in multiple languages, and here we introduced generative AI. The team successfully implemented several features, including:
- Transcription of multilanguage video content and enabling the player to use the generated transcriptions for better video comprehension
- Translation of transcriptions to multiple languages, enabling non-Croatian Netgenians to plug into our training resources
- Summarization of transcriptions and creation of video descriptions in multiple languages, needed for content search and better understanding of topics covered by video lessons
- AI-enabled generation of quiz exams from transcriptions and descriptions, helping self-assessment on the topics covered in video lessons
The technologies used in the two-week internship included dual (Python and PHP) stacks on the backend, coupled with the development of JS applications on the frontend. Among others, the team used Langchain and Django Ninja on Python and Symfony and API Platform on the PHP side, with the main JavaScript work being done in React.
Overall, the student team was able, with some help from our mentors, to successfully integrate different systems into a single, well-designed experience for our learners. Kudos to all involved!
Internship experience - from both perspectives
Students often leave their summer internship full of impressions, as it represents an exciting period filled with new experiences — essentially their first step into the world of building a career. Let’s take a look at how two of our interns, Ante and Karla, described this experience in their own words.
Ante: I learned a lot during the internship, especially about using Git on a real project. On the first day, a senior developer gave us a Git workshop, showing useful operations. For each task, I created a feature branch and opened a pull request, which mentors reviewed, providing improvement feedback. Besides Git, I learned about best practices for backend coding, the API platform, Symfony and Docker. I significantly improved my backend skills, solving various issues with or without mentor help. The company’s approach was excellent; mentors were always available for guidance, never leaving us to struggle alone.
Karla: The three-week internship was brief but valuable. I enhanced my React skills, learning best practices for problem-solving, code structure and naming functions for team readability. We faced challenges using a library of pre-made components for the project. The mentors and team were approachable, providing feedback after each task review, which helped us learn and correct mistakes. Though I wish it lasted longer, the internship was beneficial, ending with a presentation that boosted our confidence. This program is essential for students to gain practical knowledge and insight into real company work.
Ante and Karla nicely summarized their impressions and their feedback reassured us that we successfully achieved our main goals for the internship program. Since every story has two sides, we also asked the mentors and colleagues who worked with the students to share their experiences from this year’s internship and how they perceived working with them. Here are some thoughts shared with us by Marko and Igor.
Igor: As we wanted to provide the students with an experience similar to a real-life engagement with a client, my role was of a product owner, defining the project scope and priorities. From the first day and the design phase and throughout the whole project, I was impressed with the approach and capabilities of the entire team. Enthusiasm and technical skills, coupled with an excellent presentation of the work at the summer internship end, made the whole project a great experience. I can only look forward to the next occasion to work with such talented young people!
Marko: It's always challenging to balance practice and the projects we work on, but despite that, it was once again a pleasure to be one of the mentors this year. We gave students a closer look at what it's like to work on a project, with all its ups and downs. I'm not sure if we are the only ones, or "just" among the few, who strive to maintain student practice this way, but I would certainly like to believe that our highly realistic approach has proven to be spot-on. As for the team we selected, I truly have nothing but words of praise. From their communication skills to their technical abilities – everything was far beyond the typical student level.
What's next
Given our outstanding experience for over a decade, we eagerly anticipate continuing our collaboration with students and are already looking forward to the next summer internship.
Good traditions should be maintained, so we can already promise you good vibes filled with coffee and croissants. That being said, we also try to improve the experience and introduce new technologies to our programs, so stay tuned for the next student experience at Netgen!