I participated in an internship with Chipotle for my STEP Signature Project. During this internship, I worked as an IT Infrastructure Intern to learn about IT as a career, automate menial processes, and bring new technology to the team I worked on.
Initially, I had always assumed that IT could never be something that I saw myself doing long term, as I have always been someone who likes to be on the cutting edge of technology rather than on the support side. After my time at Chipotle, I came to see that many of the previous assumptions I made about the field weren’t necessarily the case. For example, there are areas in the field where you can be on the cutting edge of technology and aren’t always doing support work. However, beyond just past assumptions, I was able to learn a lot as well. An example of this is the attention that needs to be given to business needs/constraints when making decisions. I now realize that IT is a field where decisions can have significant impact on an organization as a whole. As a result, this STEP experience has made me want to pursue a career in IT.
Originally, my impression of IT was quite simple: it was a job that I could never see myself doing because I wanted to be on creating new technology, not supporting old technology. My assumptions immediately changed when I was given my first project. I was given the opportunity to work with the network engineers and learn more about their day-to-day processes. After spending some time with them, I was assigned some of their tasks to do. It became apparent to me that there were several ways to make the process more efficient. After creating and testing my solution, I was able to create a time-savings of over 75% for the company! This alone showed me that I was still able to use my software engineering background in the field of IT to provide value to an organization.
Similarly, the second project that I was given was to create an LLM to help our support team more efficiently answer questions for the restaurants. This gave me the opportunity to do something that was used modern technologies and was a completely new product for the business. With this, I was able to implement a system that was able to more effectively train and support our support team and reduce their overall response time by over 40%. Yet again, I was blown away that IT meant more than just supporting old technologies; it means supporting them while finding ways to make the process more efficient for everyone involved.
After this experience, I found IT to be really cool! It felt like every day had a routine, but also gave me the ability to make it my own by using my creative freedom to find unique solutions to unique problems. I am motivated to continue to explore the field of IT further because I enjoy using software to provide value, solve problems, and make things easier/more efficient.
This was an extremely impactful experience overall, as it gave me a new outlook on career choices and what I can do with my degree. With two internships in the food industry, I can definitely see it being a place where I can succeed, but I am motivated to try to branch out and try new industries as well. Nonetheless, I feel as though this experience have given me the confidence to succeed as a computer scientist, no matter the pathway I choose, and this is because IT/software engineering in practice not something that can be taught in a classroom; it truly is something that has to be experienced hands-on in a stressful, fast-paced, real-world environment and where decisions have real consequences on the organization.
After my experience, I walked away with two great mentors: Zach and David. Zach was my direct manager at Chipotle, and we initial bonded over shared passions. He was an excellent manager, as he encouraged learning and gave me several opportunities to do so. He was also a great culture cultivator, which inspired me to take away these qualities into the teams that I work with in the future. Beyond all of this, he has continued to support me with student organization endeavors simply because he was passionate about and wanted to give back.
As mentioned previously, my time at Chipotle yielded me yet another mentor: David. From the day I walked into the office to my very last, David has been a supporter of mine. Without fail, he has always ensured that he is checking in on me and seeing if I have free time to come take a look at some of the work he was doing. I have always wanted to deepen my understanding of the Linux world; David single-handedly made that dream a reality for me! He even gave me a Raspberry Pi to mess around with!
I can confidently say that my experience at Chipotle was one of the best I’ve ever had in an internship. I met a lot of great people and worked on some really cool projects, so I have no complaints about it! I came out of this internship with a bunch of new skills and several people I can fall back on when it comes to my professional career. I look forward to where this experience will take me next!
Annual Chili Cookoff Belt!
Clippers game with the interns!