Joe Farroha

11/8/2021

The Grit of my first internship

During the summer of 2018, I started an internship at the John Hopkins University’s Applied

Physics Laboratory (APL). In this internship I was given projects and other assignments in the

department. The main project I worked on was called project COGRAD, never really got to know what

the acronym meant. But the project was something experimental that the department I worked in

wanted to see if it could be a viable technique to solve other AI problems further down the line. The

reason that this job shows grit is because I had to overcome bad bosses, a lot of assignments, and I had

to lead another team to their project.

The language that I was coding in was python, which was a language I got familiar with for the

project and the job, however the new technique required me to use a new technology called OpenAI,

which was a software add on made by Elon Musk and it allowed for me to code AI that can learn from

itself easier. This was hard at first because there were only a few people in the whole of APL that knew

how this worked, the department head and my two bosses. During the summer I was assigned to

familiarize myself with the technology and prove I was able to code in it and plan out how I would make

project COGRAD. This was the simple part of the project, this was also the easiest time to get in contact

with my bosses, however they were somewhat vague with their instructions because they said they

wanted me to “learn this on my own”. But by the end of the summer, I was able to program a pacman

game that would be able to within 8-10 hours finish the whole game, it was able to learn from previous

mistakes and sometimes improve each round, but by the end, the program was able to run. I also laid

out an ideal way to program the project, this impressed everyone so much that they brought me back in

for the school year.

 In this time, I was applying to colleges, so I was told that I would help some other interns

brought in because of a public-school program. I was supposed to lead them through a project, as well

as do my own project, and apply to colleges. This was tough to do, however throughout the year, I was

able to get the team project done, however, my project wasn’t finished. It was not due to neglect,

however I had no help from any of my bosses, until I had a meeting with my department head, and he

told me that there was a part of the project that was already finished. The issue I was having was that I

never learned how to make an environment for OpenAI, and whenever I told my bosses that I have no

clue how, they told me I am not researching enough, or I wasn’t trying hard enough. However, the

opposite was true. But once I got this piece, I had to visit all the colleges, to make my decision. This

meant I wasn’t able to work for the next month or so. Once I made my decision and my exams were

over in school. I was told by my school to graduate, I needed to have a mini-internship, and I decided

that I would do my job at APL, try to finish the project. At this point I was told I wasn’t getting the

summer college intern promotion and one of the people I lead was, which infuriated me. This would

mean that I wasn’t going to get paid, and they were letting me go. So, in my last week there, I worked

for almost 3 days, I was kicked out of the office by 5pm due to my status, and I finished the program,

submitted it to my superiors and left.

The grit I showed there impressed everyone in that office, especially the heads of other

departments, however it was to late for them to snag me up. I was able to lead and complete not one,

but two projects. To put this into perspective, most interns in my position get a group to work with to do

their project, and they aren’t able to get halfway through theirs. I found this out when I was saying my

goodbyes to the people in the office. Of course my last day there, both my bosses weren’t present.