Software Engineering Intern
Paycom
My first internship. I was on Paycom's mobile team — the iOS app that millions of employees use for payroll and HR.
The gap between coursework and production was real — my first PR came back with more red than code. I learned to read a codebase before trying to change it, to ask questions early instead of guessing, and to think about edge cases before someone else found them in review.
The engineers on the team were generous with their time. They walked me through the architecture instead of waving me off, and their PR feedback taught me more about writing production code than any class had. The other interns made it too — we were all figuring it out together, comparing notes on which parts of the codebase made sense and which ones didn't.
The thing I took away: knowing a language doesn't mean you know how to work in it. Swift native development was familiar from personal work, but production iOS at scale — code review, testing patterns, shipping to millions of users — is a different thing entirely. This was where I learned the difference.
By the end of the summer I knew I wanted to do this for real — and the reason wasn't the code, it was the people I got to build with.
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