My first professional work experience

I have applied to many positions based in various countries. Naturally, I applied to several job and internship positions at company’s based in Prague. After interviewing with many of these companies, I was fortunate enough to earn a position at Monster.com after passing their technical test and an interview with the team manager. Monster is an American company, but have a Prague branch based in Karlín that works on many projects assigned by the product team based in San Francisco. Monster Worldwide is a provider of global online employment solutions, which manages one of the largest job search engines in the world and one of the most trafficked employment websites in the United States.

My position at the Prague branch of Monster Worldwide was a Software Engineer role. Monster classifies its employees based on experience and complexity of the role they apply for, which meant that, as an undergraduate, I was eligible for their associate position. Yet still, I was entrusted with high profile project, such as developing the front end for a web application by myself in order to allow the company to pivot from data centres to the cloud, which has enormous financial benefits for a company this size. Being in charge of my own project meant that I had the freedom to express my own ideas and propose solutions for how to reach software requirements specifications of upcoming projects, but I was also expected to challenge current approaches and propose new solutions to challenges faced in existing projects. Since my internship at Monster Worldwide marked my first job as a member of a development team with significant responsibility, I had the clear aim to gain an understating of how software development functions at reputable tech companies such as Monster. Moreover, I wanted to form a comprehensive idea of what it is like to work in the tech industry. Ideally, this internship would guide my decision on what career path to pursue after completing my university degree — that is, primarily answering whether software engineering is the right path for me.

From a technical point of view, I walked away from the internship with an improved idea of how to design high-quality software by learning from more experienced software engineers. I was not only expected me to write high-quality software that would be of value to the company, but expected to do so with an array of programming languages and APIs that were new to me. Most importantly, I wanted to have something to show for my 3 months at Monster, which I was ecstatic to achieve by building a web application that will be featured on the Military.com website. After such a positive experience, I am certain that I will want to dedicate the first 2 years after graduation university to a software engineering career.