When I first started interning with Cheeseburger Therapy, I had zero clue what I was actually getting myself into. All I knew was that I met the owner, and I liked his envisions. Prior to working with the rest of the team, I expected them to be very stereotypical techy people. Now, I’m not too sure what that even means, but at the time I thought they’d be very reserved, kinda nerdy, and just the typical image of what a coder looks like on tv. My mind was going a million different directions, but my main worry was not being able to provide enough for the team as Morgan originally hoped when he first met me. In my mind, I had just involved myself into the tech industry very promptly and I doubted I had the skills to contribute ideas and skills of a higher caliber.

    The first day I met Mike, we sat down and just talked about my interest and what I hoped to gain from working with the company. To sum it up, I told him I’m up for anything and willing to learn as much as possible. We decided that at the time, the training the site had for new therapists joining the team, was very mediocre and could use refurbishment. Remodeling the training became my assigned project for the next several months. Part of my daily duties while working on the training were to check in with either Morgan or Michael once a day, and to reach out to new people to read through the existing material and essentially interview them and ask them what they think needs to be improved. This process went on for several weeks, interviewing, editing, interviewing, editing. After about a month and a half, Morgan and Mike met with me and asked if I could put in more hours for the company, and made me the offer of becoming a paid intern. Soon after that, I began putting in more hours, and getting the material where I wanted it to be.

    As the weeks went by, I began to get closer to the thing I was nervous about from the start, coding. Again, my coding skills were very minimal, but I had grasped the concept pretty well from my summer program. This was my obstacle for about 2 hours, just having to read and take several tutorials on the coding language. What made this language difficult to become fluent in wasn’t the fact that it was new, but that Michael developed this language on his own and no one else has access to it. When I asked him why he did this, he simply said “I don’t like the languages that are being used right now, so I made one”. I was in awe, telling other people who are familiar with coding, that this man decided to create his own language and has been developing it for the past decade, always seems to impress everyone as much as it impresses me. After reviewing the steps with him one on one and seeing the patterns he used from other languages, the knowledge was sucked in dry.

    My experience interning with Cheese has been unlike anything I ever imagined. The company is ran by incredibly talented, sociable, goofy friends and they’ve found their way of contributing the a problem they thought believed tackling. That is what I’ve learned from my experience. Sitting around and complaining does not suffice. If you want something done, don’t wait for the guy next to you to do it, just give your shot.