Let me start off by saying: this past week was incredible! It's hard to think of where to start; there are so many things that happened! Check out the rest of the post to see how things went.
Independent Printing Co., Inc. is a company based in De Pere, Wisconsin (part of the Green Bay area), specializing in printing and related communications. Everyone in the company is great, and it feels almost like a "family" atmosphere. Here is a little blurb from their web site:
Independent Printing first opened its doors back in 1935 — with a staff of two operating out of a basement, believe it or not! Today, we’re a highly-respected, award-winning print and communications firm with a team of over 300 skilled, responsive individuals. What a difference 70 years makes!
To what do we credit our growth and continued success? That’s easy. We’d have to say its our sincere interest in helping customers achieve their own success! Our customers not only trust us to provide high-quality print and on-line services, they rely on us for creative solutions, educational assistance, environmental responsibility, and more. And we deliver!
Last Wednesday, Thursday, and the beginning of this week, I have met with my department head, and the few people I will be working with. All of them seem like awesome people, and were very friendly to welcoming me. They all have so much information that they will be able to share with me, I hope that i will be able to take it all in and retain it! I have also had the opportunity to meet with the Vice President of the division of the company I will be in. Its because of him and my internship coordinator, Mr. Conati, that I have this internship. I love his outlook on everything; he has such a positive view of not only business, but life in general. I hope that I will get to have many more conversations with him over the course of this internship.
I also had the opportunity to meet one of the most talked about alums from Ferris State University: Janna. Let me just say this: she definitely met all of my expectations — she is one of the nicest people I have ever met. Joy and I had the opportunity to hang out with both her and Matt (her boyfriend, also another Ferris Alum), and they are just a great couple of people. We look forward to hanging out with them more over the summer, and maybe hearing some stories of the FSU Print Program from before I was there.
I will be working in the Information Services (IS) department. IS is responsible for a few things, such as managing the database servers that the internal apps use, maintaining and developing applications to get specific tasks done, and several other related responsibilities. My responsibilities will be to maintain and extend a billing and reporting system that they currently use to give their clients a detailed view of product orders.
The project that I will be working on will be a new game for me: it is a .NET application written in C# 3.5. Sadly, I have never had the opportunity to work deeply with C#, I have only had brief experiences with it back in the .NET 1.1 and 2.0 days (I was a VB.NET kind of guy). So far, I have picked the language up very quickly. In fact, it reminds me very much of static-typed Ruby, as far as general language features.
Thankfully, my manager/direct supervisor that I will be working closely with on this project knows his stuff. Already this week he has introduced me to a few new programming methodologies (such as a Class Factory, and using Microsoft Linq to access data very elegantly across multiple data sources). I hope to learn a lot more from him and I hope that I could possibly teach him a couple of things as well.
I look forward to spending my summer with Independent. This was only the first week, and I have already had a great time getting to know the company, the people, and what my part will be. I will post as often as possible, so check back soon!