Two years ago, in April 2022, Unstructured Studio became part of the prestigious Outreachy internship for the first time. Outreachy, an open-source and open-science organization, provides paid and remote internship opportunities with the goal to support underrepresented groups in tech. For this year’s summer round, we selected three talented and passionate individuals, Hemant, Faridah and Yaya, respectively from India, Nigeria and Cameroon, as part of our 2023 cohort to work on our web and mobile based platform, ZubHub.
As an organization, our values lie not just in STEAM, but within the creativity and curiosity that nurtures it. Hence, while selecting our next interns, we emphasised not only on the technical prowess of the candidates, but also on their outlook towards this internship. All three of those selected had a thirst for knowledge, were dedicated to improving themselves and our platform, and were consistent in their efforts.
As August ended, and our time with them drew to a close, we had one final call with them to reminisce on the short but eventful period they spent with us. Hemant, located in Hyderabad, India, was involved the most in revamping our landing page for non-logged in users on ZubHub. He also added many new features to the platform such as the ability to create new teams and add creators to a team project. Now, similar to WhatsApp groups, projects can be started by a creator who will take on the role of the admin, and who can oversee the people being added to the project. He shared a fun story with us wherein he was stuck with a backend issue for two days, until he had an eureka moment while going about his day-to-day life, and the problem was fixed.
Faridah, from Abuja, Nigeria, was our UI designer. Her main goal in these three months was improving the user experience of the platform. She worked with Hemant on the landing page redesign and grouping features. Along with these, she worked on project and activity creation form designs, and many more aspects. In her words, it had been an equally challenging and invigorating experience. Her time here made her challenge herself, and she enjoyed the openness with which we approached work and understood and accommodated each other.
Yaya is a software engineer from Buea, Cameroon. His contributions were critical in improving the user interface of the activities and project creations pages. For Yaya, this was a learning experience. He worked with programming languages such as Django and Python that he had no familiarity with before. It taught him to push his boundaries and persevere. He especially cherished his one-on-one calls with Suchakra, our co-founder, and his brainstorming sessions with Faridah.
We also received constructive feedback from our interns. In the future rounds, we will ensure to remain fully active during the contribution period, as that is critical in maintaining morale among candidates.
We were really lucky to have gotten to work with such dedicated individuals. Their quality contributions were essential in overhauling and redesigning ZubHub. We have no doubt that they have bright futures ahead of them and we wish them all the luck in the world.