Andrew shares his summer experience working with & learning from Tech Talent South in Charlotte, NC.

Six months ago I guarantee you that coding was not even close to being on my mind. A month before summer, however, I somehow managed to land an internship with an incredible coding education company called Tech Talent South. Not entirely sure what I was getting myself into, I came to work on the first day dressed in a formal business attire ready to get my hands dirty. I was immediately reminded that this was a startup and that the team members wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I wasn’t complaining…

I quickly adapted to the culture of the company, which was characterized by a deep respect for one another and an unrelenting desire to better the company and our students. My role has been to assist the marketing and sales team, but as the summer has gone along, I’ve been able to get a taste for almost every branch of the company from finance and business development, to operations, and lastly… computer programming.

After two weeks of interning, I began taking Tech Talent South’s Code Immersion course which was a 4 hour a day, 5 days a week, intensive full stack web development course. We covered the basics of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript before diving deep into Ruby, a backend language, on the Rails framework. While I am still deep in the course at the moment, it has proven to be an immensely challenging, yet incredibly fun part of my summer.

What has made my summer particularly interesting and fruitful has been the array of experiences and people I have met. From coding in the mornings, to meetings with community members at Advent Co-Working during lunch, to helping to run and understand the business in the afternoons, I have stayed plenty busy and learned an incredible deal about how startups are created and operated.

My goal for this summer is to draw from the many experiences and people that I have been able to learn from this summer and apply those to personal entrepreneurial endeavors that I am pursuing. It has been rewarding being able to supplement the Davidson academic curriculum with some amazing opportunities to get my hands dirty as I understand the workings of a successful and local startup at Tech Talent South.