Hi, my name is Jan Jaap de Groot. I’m 20 years old and I’m studying Computer Science at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede, The Netherlands.
I just became a third year student, because unlike Australia, the school year ends in July and starts in September. I am required to do an internship with the length of half a school year (5 months) for my degree.
You can do this internship anywhere you want, as long as the company/organisation is of high enough quality. Since the start of my second year I’ve been gathering information about doing this internship abroad.
My student career supervisor contacted Ian Johnson in the third semester. A few Saxion students did already successfully finish an internship with Ian as supervisor. Ian responded after a while, and there was a spot available for me!
I calculated the expected costs, researched a lot about the things I would need to take care of, and accepted the spot. Since then I had to get a lot of things done before I could actually step in the plane. Some keywords: plane ticket, visa, phone contract, rent contract, insurances, funds, passing my exams …
But everything has been taken care of and I’ve now been in Sydney for nearly three weeks. I will be working on Heurist, and more specifically (short term):
– Implementing ElasticSearch to improve search results.
– Building a new search interface.
– Data visualisation with the help of D3.
– Visualising the database summary.
– Going through all code, re-indenting & fixing the layout where needed plus writing documentation.
I will mainly be working with PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS. In addition, with the MySQL/ElasticSearch back-ends; so with the Linux terminal as well. I like building things that people find useful, and try to make them as easy to use as possible. Some of my personal projects can be found on here (Dutch, but with pictures).