What is GE?
General Electric is a USA based multi-national company, where I worked as an intern over this summer. This 100+ years old corporation operates in more than 180 countries with more than 300,000 employees. GE's broad range of products are from jet engines to power generation equipment, financial services to media content. The unit I have been working for was GE Energy.


How did that happen?
I heard about this internship through the International Development Office of my University. Among other things, they help students to find international academic and job experience. I got selected based on my resume and an interview which went pretty well. I briefly explained the technologies I was into and the kind of projects I had been working on.
The office was located in a state-of-the-art IT Park, known as the Cyber Pearl. I was about to start my first corporate project. It felt like I was getting in the IT industry for the first time. Kind of. After long hours of lonely coding from my student room, I was now in an actual work environment. It was somewhat different but I was ready. Technically there was not much else I could do because I didn’t really know what my task would be. I just knew it would be exciting.
 

What exactly were we doing over there?
I can’t disclose actual details about the project I had been working on but I would say that it has been a chance to improve my problem solving skills. I could sum it up in two words: "Fun Learning". Even though the technology context may have been an advantage from the start, it's quite clear that this internship involved a much wider range of skills throughout the project, including effective project management, time management, corporate culture and team collaboration, to name a few. I was learning and improving through my assigned tasks, and (perhaps more importantly) through my team feedback. Plus it was a pleasant experience because my teammates kept encouraging me to tackle ambitious tasks. it was challenging in a good way.


So... To make a long story short, what was the point?
As a wise man used to say, it's quite hard to learn swimming just from reading a book about it, there are some Truths that one doesn't easily perceive in a classroom setting, or while coding alone. It's been convenient to interact with brilliant professionals from the engineering industry, to learn from their experience and advice, and definitely, to explore the reality of large scale projects.