First two weeks at CDK Global
First thing’s first
What, where, who is CDK Global?
CDK Global essentially produces a variety of software and technologies for Car dealerships all across the globe. So they’re partnered with companies like Toyota, Volkswagen, etc. and make all kinds of customer interface softwares and even internal tools.
They are located all over the world with teams in India, Chicago, Texas, and Portland.
Portland is the office where I am at. (If you couldn’t already tell from my previous posts.
The very first day was on June 19th and I ended up meeting the very first high school intern on the elevator. It was comforting to actually know someone before going in and after waiting for a few minutes Dianna, whom is my recruiter and twin, greeted us and took us to the conference room where we joined other interns. We played the typical awkward ice breakers but actually ended up knowing a lot about the other fellow interns.
The very first person to give a talk was one of the most genuine people I have ever met. A week before the internship actually started, my recruiter actually set up a lunch for me and the team and we went out to Chipotle. I got a special lunch with my manager as well as other software engineers on the team. And one of the software engineers gave a starting talk on just the general course of the internship.
Each intern gets to have their very own work laptop which are black touch screen Dell laptops and when IT handed it out to us, I was reminded on how lucky I was to just be in the office and experience this opportunity.
The first few days were a series of workshops to introduce us to topics like Agile Development, SCRUM, GIT, HTML/CSS by our very own mentors. And it was so exciting to be learning this outside of a school setting because we were actually going to apply it to a real project. We were practically software engineers except the expectations weren’t that high. From the very start, they’ve emphasized that they want the internship to be a fun, learning experience and not something that we should be stressing about which was so amazing to hear and it’s what made me love it. We weren’t getting graded on our finished product but we wanted to make it as nice as possible.
One of the coolest things I signed up for as an intern in my first two weeks was to become an Summer Correspondent. My job was to take pictures and videos of different intern events throughout the seven weeks for they were going to use it for a video they were going to create to showcase at career fairs and presentations . One of the perks was having access to Snapchat Spectacles so I signed up as soon as possible.
After a week of introductions and workshops, we had an intern social at the end of the week where we got catered food from a famous Hawaiian Portland Food Truck as well as a raffle. Unfortunately, I didn’t win the raffle haha.
But it was an amazing first two weeks and I will be following up with some highlight events in the next few blog posts!
Meanwhile HERE ARE SOME PICTURES!
