Looking Back on the Summer

Sunday, July 30, 2017

DTech interns Tara, Carly and Gray at the San Francisco Pride Parade

I’m the first of the DTech interns to finish my internship this summer.  As I write this blog, I’m sitting on a plane on the way to Sydney, Australia to study abroad this upcoming school semester.  I’m excited for new adventures, but also starting to get the feeling of missing out on being at work and going to the DTech events with all of the other amazing DTech scholars. 

I spent the summer working at Fanatics which is a sports e-commerce company that also runs the websites and apps for a majority of the major sports league teams around the world.  I worked on the Fanatics Branded team with a fellow DTech intern Maddie Nelson doing Product Management and Software Engineering.  I spent half my time working with Maddie and one of our coworkers, Morgan, on writing a backend microservice for our team and the other half going to meetings with my manager and gathering various business requirements.  Everyday I would have different experiences like going out to lunch with different execs in the company, to teaching the CTO Matt Madrigal how to dab, to getting to go to the Boulder office for the week to hang out with my team.  I really felt like a valuable part of my team because everyone made an effort to include me and I was making real contributions. As a result of the incredible culture and the fast paced environment, I feel like I really learned what it’s like to work at a tech company and what I should look for in a company I’m considering working at in the future. 

Before this summer, people would ask me what I wanted to do with my Computer Science degree and I would say that I had absolutely no idea because I had no idea what I could do with it.  The field was intimidating and a mystery partially because we’re taught about so many different sectors of technology that I didn’t think I would be able to keep up.  Because of this, it’s not difficult to understand why there’s such a shortage of women in tech.  Thanks to DTech, I’ve learned that it’s not about how well you learn and perform in the classroom, but how quickly you can adapt and learn the necessary skills to succeed in a work environment. I’ve gotten incredible advice from people at work, my DTech mentor, and other strong women in the tech field who I’ve met through the program.  It’s become clearer that I want to stay in the tech field because I now know that I can be successful.

Carly Levi
Class of 2019
Major: Computer Science
Minors: Global Health and Gender, Sexuality & Feminism Studies
Internship: Fanatics