By Tobi Onibudo | Co-Op Student, Dalhousie University
Third and final Co-op Internship performed at NorthBay
On the NorthBay Experience:
When Tobi Onibudo, a second-year computer science major at Dalhousie University, learned about the NorthBay Co-op Internship Program, he decided to take the leap and apply. With a deep interest in all things cloud, NorthBay seemed like the ideal company for his first co-op experience. Read on to learn more.
Applying for your first co-op internship can be pretty scary. Were you confident you would be accepted?
Yes, it can be scary, and it was! However, I believed I could meet the requirements, so even though I knew there was a lot of competition for this role, I decided to apply. And I’m so glad that I did.
Going into the program, what goals did you set for yourself?
As I began the program, I aimed to learn more about what it takes to create scalable software solutions. I wanted to learn about best-practice processes, tools and techniques. More specifically, I wanted to get hands-on experience working with AWS services.
Do you feel that you achieved those goals?
Absolutely! My NorthBay mentors willingly answered all my questions – and I had a lot of them. They also provided lots of helpful resources to help learn about AWS services. However, the hands-on experience working on actual projects, as well as the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas with Trusha, my fellow co-op student, were instrumental to my success
What projects did you work on?
The first project I worked on involved creating the environment required to launch a web server in the cloud, using AWS EC2, VPC, and IAM services. Thinking through and implementing security protocols for the server was both interesting and challenging.
I also worked on a web application that displayed company fillings from the SEC website. I utilized a web scraping Python script, AWS RDS, and created a web API to complete the back end. The user interface was completed using React.
Lastly, I worked on a data lake project to enable a NorthBay client to gain insights into how users interact with their products. This was completed utilizing a Python script, AWS Glue, AWS Kinesis, AWS S3, AWS Athena, and Snowflake.
What was the best part(s) of your experience?
So many things really. Learning all about the development cycle for a web application was a real highlight. Overall, it was a great opportunity to build on the skills I had and gain a ton of new ones
What advice would you give to future Co-op students?
Be open to learning new concepts. NorthBay really cares about your learning and development, so don’t be scared to try new things or to ask questions.
