Right now, start-ups in the United States are booming. Tech start-ups are doing immensely well. Their products and services are unprecedented and larger companies, like Google and Amazon, are buying up start-ups in droves to gain access to both their talent and intellectual property.

When I was searching for an internship, I had a good selection of places to work. Some were start-ups, some were small, established businesses, and others were massive global corporations. At the first MCIT social event, second year students talked about their summer internships. One student’s experience really piqued my interest. He did his internship with a start-up and told us about how he was able to learn whatever he thought might help him do his job. If he needed a week to learn a new technology, it was granted. He talked about how he was able to be a jack-of-all-trades because working at a start-up meant all-hands-on-deck. (Ahhh, buzzwords!)

I’d already worked at a large corporation and I knew that even in the tech department, you might end up in a lonely cubicle with deadlines, Deadlines, DEADLINES!!!! Not only that, many corporations expect you to already know how to do your responsibilities and can be inflexible when it comes to learning on the job, considering those deadlines that must be met. NOW! On the flip side, some corporations give interns menial assignments that will never be put into production.

So, I was excited when one local start-up offered me an internship. My experience was very much like the second-year student who inspired me to embrace start-up life in the first place. I worked in the start-up’s brand new office, located in a new and thriving innovation center that also housed other start-ups and incubators. The office was modern and well-furnished. Offices lined one whole wall along with a conference room. There was a kitchen with more counterspace and cabinets than some apartments. Like many tech companies today, the open floorplan is revered. That’s where I worked: 6 wooden desks pushed together into one big table, one of many desk-groups in the open floorplan.

I’ll say this about open floorplans: They’re meant to foster collaboration, and they do. But they also make it difficult to concentrate as people go in and out of the office, move around the space, or as some people collaborate while others are working independently. There were two points during my internship where I needed to get some critical functionality working and I asked to work from home so I could concentrate without constant distractions. Sure enough, working from home made me enormously productive. It made me wonder if the open floorplan’s collaborative benefit is worth the loss in productivity associated with the lack of a quiet, private space.

I’ve written before about what I learned on my internship and how I did it. There’s no way I would have mastered all of these new technologies in any environment other than at a start-up. Each time I was given a new project, I had no idea how to go about doing any of it! It was daunting, but I was given time to learn. And it made my successes that much sweeter. I went from, “Seriously? I don’t know how to do that!” to “Woohoo, it works! Check it out!” My boss let me struggle, but he always had confidence that I’d come through. And I did!

The company I interned for was a little more organized than start-ups that are just starting. I was always a developer, but I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades developer. My main focus was front-end development, but that encompasses many realms. Not only did I make a website with dynamic content, I did WordPress development in PHP and created a Play Framework template and controller in Scala. I learned how APIs work, all about HTTP requests, about how to use JSON to do some pretty amazing things. If you had told me back in May that I’d be doing these projects, I’d have told you that you were crazy. But here I am, at the end of my internship and I’m so much more capable of web development that I ever thought possible!

Working at a start-up helped me grow as a software developer. I didn’t just learn some great technologies. I learned how to learn. I gained a ton of confidence in my ability to deliver quality results, meeting and, in some cases, exceeding expectations. I will always be grateful to the start-up that believed in me. Thank you!