In the best meaning possible, “Jumping into the deep end” is the phrase I would use to describe my interning experience at Bullhorn this summer. I constantly learned and challenged myself with the subject matter. It was an opportunity that I am extremely grateful to have been awarded.
Bullhorn is a company whose mission is to improve and optimize the staffing industry through the use of software and artificial intelligence. During my time at Bullhorn, I was exposed to the numerous programs and projects that Bullhorn has been working on during its 25-year lifetime (I was able to attend a meeting celebrating this milestone!). Most notable are the customer relationship management software and applicant tracking systems, which are both the foundational programs on which the Bullhorn model was built. While its headquarters are in Boston, MA, Bullhorn functions as a largely virtual company. This means that its employees work online and are from all over the United States and Great Britain. With their recent acquisition of TextKernel–a Dutch software company specializing in AI staffing solutions—the company now also includes employees from the Netherlands.
My role at Bullhorn was as a software engineer. I was a part of the Builders Team—a team that is made up of interns and software engineers who were new to the company. Our team was spearheaded by Rohit Mahatma, the manager, and Adam Crowe—the interns' manager, scrum master, and technical lead. Adam was a huge help in answering my numerous questions when I would run into blockers while coding and working through tickets. There were 5 other interns on the team, 4 of which were in different stages of their college journeys, and Bridget Minogue, who is my classmate at Rivers. Additionally, our team consisted of a junior software engineer new to the company and two quality assurance specialists.
Kicking off my time at Bullhorn was an onboarding week. This week consisted of Zoom meetings to set up my computer, get access to the Bullhorn systems, and meet the team. To do this, I set up one-on-one meetings with my fellow team members to get to know them and introduce myself. I also participated in “Coffee Chats” where different members of the Bullhorn community introduced us interns to their systems, in small group-interactive meetings. Getting the opportunity to learn about the different departments of the company and how they interact with each other from department heads was a meaningful and memorable experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Following this first week, we interns were tasked with working through learning paths on Udemy where we learned the ins and outs of the code and frameworks that Bullhorn utilizes. This is where the “jumping into the deep end” began. Diving into the learning paths taught me how to code in the Java and Javascript languages (both of which I had no previous experience with), as well as how to test my code using the WebDriver IO, Selenium, and TestNG interfaces. Furthermore, later learning paths exposed me to the Angular coding framework and writing Automation scripts. Working through these learning paths was super valuable in teaching me these essential skills and in exploring the software engineering industry.
Next, I moved on to ticket work! Tickets are program bugs or tasks that are assigned to our team, each individual on the team then assigns the ticket to themselves. To “solve” each ticket, I had to recreate the issue on my computer, diagnose what was causing it and in what part of the code, make the code changes necessary, and then create a merge request to merge that fixed code onto the actual repository where the code is accessed by the Bullhorn software. In addition to all this, I created a test plan and met with specialists to ensure that my work adhered to their code conventions/standards. As I assigned myself tickets, I often knew little about the information given on the ticket so I was “jumping into the deep end” with these tasks that I had little knowledge about—I was constantly learning as I worked through the ticket.
Some of the tickets that I worked on this summer involved creating automated testing to verify that all the text in a long email appears (as it sometimes got cut off), updating some documentation regarding information requests to a database through an API (Application Programming Interface), and manually testing the response returned by making Rest API calls (essentially verifying that the user is redirected to the right place they requested). I enjoyed being able to access real active code and include my changes in the actual Bullhorn product as it made me feel accomplished that I was actually contributing to the end product.
We would work on these tickets in two-week “sprints” designed to verify that new code works with older code and to incentivize breaking up large projects into smaller tasks to ensure progress and productivity. At the end of each “sprint,” or two-week period, there was a “code freeze” where every software engineer stopped adding new code or working on their tickets. During this time, we took part in testing whatever new code was merged during the sprint in a process called regression testing. Later that day, our Builders Team would have a “retrospective meeting” where we would fill out a “retro board” to reflect on the past sprint and identify what we did well and what we could improve for the next sprint. During these meetings, we also took some time to play team bonding games and other activities.
Overall, the lessons I learned at Bullhorn extended way past automation, APIs or software development in general. I experienced teamwork at its best, support from my peers, accountability for my work, and how my contributions were important to the bigger process. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Bullhorn this summer, and I can’t thank Rohit Mahatma, Adam Crowe, the rest of the Builders Team, and Mr. Schlenker enough for this opportunity and for making this experience so great! Thank you!
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