Q: What do you study in school?

A: I am an undergraduate student at MIT, and I study Computer Science (6-3) with a minor in Economics (14). I am considering pursuing a Master’s degree as part of MIT’s MEng program in the future.

Q: When did you start learning coding languages?

A: I first started learning coding languages in my sophomore year. To go into more detail; my first coding language was C++, which I started learning during the winter of sophomore year in high school as part of my efforts to participate in the USACO competition. The reason I chose C++ was due to its efficient runtime, and from there I took the AP Computer Science A class offered at my high school in my senior year, which was in Java. Over the summer before starting college, I began learning Python, and have continued to use it as my primary language, with most classes at MIT being taught in Python. A lot of the work I did for BoostDraft was in C#, which was similar in its OOP structure and syntax as the languages I had learnt before, and XAML, which was a completely new type of language for me.

Q: How did you find BoostDraft?

A: I found BoostDraft through Handshake, an online resource offered by MIT to help students connect with companies of their choice. I was in particular looking for a software engineering internship, and BoostDraft came up as one of my searches on the Handshake app.

Q: Why did you decide to do an internship in BoostDraft, not other companies?

A: There were two primary reasons I decided to do an internship in BoostDraft as opposed to other companies. The first was that the information presented on BoostDraft’s Handshake page, as well as external links provided in the post, delved extensively into many internal projects that I found to be very interesting. While I, as an underclassman, didn’t know much about natural language processing or the various machine learning methods the company utilized to create their BoostDraft technology, I saw true potential in their idea and yearned to participate in the effort to bring it to fruition. Moreover, the recruiting process for BoostDraft was very personalized and welcoming; I was able to meet with Yohei, a cofounder of the organization, and have a detailed discussion about my interest in working for my company and particular projects within the organization.

Q: What is the best thing in BoostDraft after internship

A: One of the best things about BoostDraft I felt throughout the internship was the company culture. Every morning JST, we would have a company-wide meeting updating our progress from the day before and our plans for the day moving onward. As someone who had joined the company with a love of the projects that we were working on and an appreciation of the efforts that the team members were putting in to bring this novel idea to life, being able to see what all the other interns and employees were working on helped me understand how I was playing a role in the BoostDraft project. The ease with which I was able to reach out to other individuals if I needed their help on anything was also something that I really appreciated about the company culture. In alignment with being able to see how I was playing a role in the BoostDraft project, another enjoyable aspect about the internship was how it allowed me to look into and resolve issues being caused by BoostDraft, rather than being assigned an independent project to work on for the duration of my internship. This was the case for all my previous internships and research endeavors, but during my time at BoostDraft I was able to directly work on issues within the larger BoostDraft project, collaborating with other software engineers instead of working independently the entire time. Lastly, BoostDraft offered a level of flexibility that I had not seen in any other organization I had worked in before. As someone who was based in the US working for BoostDraft, a company that is based in Japan, I naturally had a time zone conflict. However, the flexibility in work hours offered by the company allowed me to overcome this issue, and with adaptable meeting hours as well, I had absolutely no trouble working on the BoostDraft project despite being based in a different company.

Q: What is the biggest learning through internship?

A: As someone who hadn’t had a lot of experience prior to the internship working with the user interface, this internship helped me learn about how my C# code could be integrated with the xaml files used to display various windows, progress bars, message boxes, and other front-end aspects to create a working part of the BoostDraft app. Moreover, BoostDraft is not a standalone app in that it acts as an add-on for Word documents, so it was interesting to see the code I wrote manipulating the text inside Word documents and taking in and parsing data within that document. All in all, BoostDraft presented me the opportunity to learn how back end and front end could be brought together to create a working service for users, something that I hadn’t experienced previously.

Q: How much experience have you had for C# and git, and how do you catch up with them?

A: To be truthful, I had almost no experience with C# or git. However, because I had knowledge working with Python and C++, and a lot of the C# syntax was similar to them, it was relatively easy to learn and adapt to this new language. Moreover, my experience with Java helped me understand the heavily object-oriented layout of a lot of the code I had to read and write. On the other hand, I was fairly unfamiliar with git and did not have any experience working with similar services. However, my software engineering mentor, James, was very patient with my learning process with git, and I was provided with a lot of guides he created to help me with the git commands I had to use for the internship. Moreover, through trial and error – much of the error James helped me fix – I gained a solid understanding of how to use git through the internship. Through the help of my previous experiences, my mentor, and learning from mistakes, I was able to overcome the difficulties of working with C# and git, both of which I was unfamiliar with at the beginning of my internship.

Q: Work you did in the internship

A: The work in my internship was somewhat of an amalgamation of back end and front end; for back end, I worked to create code for BoostDraft features that I would the implement with xaml, which is the front end aspect of my internship. As mentioned previously, I found it very likable that my internship for BoostDraft allowed me to tackle issues in both the back end and front end areas, especially so because I could see firsthand the product of my work and how it would play a role in the BoostDraft app.

Q: What is the impression of BoostDraft?

A: In my personal opinion, BoostDraft is a company with tremendous potential. The ideas driving the company are unmatched by any competitor in the US or Asian market, and the BoostDraft app pinpoints a very particular yet widespread issue, methodically crafting a service that creates a meticulous solution to the problem. Already having achieved success in the Japanese market, I can only look forward to the future achievements that BoostDraft will be making on the world stage.

Q: Message for future interns