Internship at Procurify in the Time of Covid
By: Gary Gao
Tags: Procurify, Intership

(Procurify Photo)

I never thought I would do my first internship at home. Honestly, when BC declared state of emergency to support COVID-19 response, I worried a lot about the incoming internship at Procurify. Would it be canceled due to Covid-19 or would I just sit in front of the laptop in my room and code every day? However, Procurify dispelled all of the misgivings and gave me a novel and perfect experience in an unusual manner. Procurify enforced mandatory remote work starting from March 2020 and created efficient remote work processes.

Job Responsibilities

My name is Gary and I am a Master of Engineering student at UBC. I am working in Procurify as a backend intern in Team Carrot. Team Carrot’s mission is to help companies confidently track spending by providing a frictionless spend management process. We deliver robust new features to customers based on their expectations and feedback, which is exciting as well as challenging for me. it gives me a sense of accomplishment by witnessing the process from analyzing to sign-off of a new feature.

Gary Morning

(Martin Morning, TV show)

Every morning I wake to meet sundry tickets waiting to be triaged! When I am responsible for triaging incoming tickets for my team, I need to collect enough information about new tickets to ensure that they are ready to be worked on. It’s a very good opportunity to get familiar with our Procurify product since I’d try to reproduce the issue and do some initial research. Some issues appear in the areas that I’ve never touched before so this exploration process makes my mornings novel and unique.

Remote Work

Back to the time when I first joined Procurify, I literally knew nothing about spend management and always felt lost during meetings. Remote work makes the onboarding process more challenging since my mentor and coworkers are not next to me side by side to answer my questions. However, thanks to my reliable teammates, they were very enthusiastic and excited to teach me about our project. Also, I am grateful that they always answered my questions patiently and were willing to jump to Zoom calls to have discussions. The ability to learn how to ask for help proactively is a significant part of my internship experience.

Though working in an office can provide more opportunities for communication, the leveraging of Zoom and Slack helps me work closely with the team. Every morning, we gather for a team standup meeting. It’s a time to have chit-chats and share progress and challenges in the team. The use of Kanban agile development methodology and a clear definition of team processes result in an effective way to align the team and create plans. Meetings are virtual but everyone is real. I have 1-on-1 meetings with teammates to go over my concerns and feedback. I was encouraged by teammates to come up with some technical initiatives and show my opinions. Thanks to my teammates’ enthusiasm and support, I started being not afraid to ask questions and express myself. Besides work-related meetings, Fun Times on evenings makes me feel like I am in a party room though I am always the last one in a multiplayer drawing game Skribbl. For me, the only drawback of remote work is that I didn’t know my teammates’ height until the first in-person team gathering.

Learning

As an intern at Procurify, the best part is autonomy. Before starting the job, the engineering team reached out to me to give me a chance to learn about different engineering teams and share my interests. Also, I have a chance to work on different areas I am interested in. At first, I was always worried about messing up and was scared to make decisions. Thankfully, encouragement from my dedicated mentor, David, and manager, Vivian, makes me feel more confident in making my own decisions and expressing ideas. With ample support and feedback from Team Carrot, my abilities have been strengthened and I learned how to be a reliable team member and be effective in team collaboration. Various experiences provided by Procurify such as hosting daily standup, demoing recent works and running the retrospective meeting enhanced and expanded my experience working in a team environment. These experiences make me feel integrated into the team and being treated as a full-time and a part of Procurify.

Before starting the internship at Procurify, I expected to learn technical skills, which might be the most common point of an internship after all. Unexpectedly, I got valuable and precious personal growth: I am getting to be more extroverted, energized and confident. Self-improvement beyond academics is a bigger achievement I made through this 4-month internship at Procurify. I am looking forward to pursuing the new adventure in the incoming 8-month internship at Procurify.