On March 23, a meeting of the virtual internship participants was held within the framework of the DIT4BEARs project. At the meeting, the results of the internship were discussed, as well as certificates were awarded.

The internship participants, Artem Anashchenko and Dmitry Khoziainov, the students at the Higher School of Information Technologies and Automated Systems of NArFU, took part in the DIT4BEARs technology transfer hackathon in November 2020.

Ilya Mayorov, Director of the HSE SAFU, and Valentin Makarov, President of the RUSSOFT, gave a welcoming speech to the interns, noting that the expansion of cooperation with universities helps to develop the potential of Russian students.

Yevgeny Shatunov, BETA project manager, talked about the internship tasks and results, as well as what useful knowledge and practical experience the interns had received.

“We set a goal so that the participants could get real, practical knowledge of how to create products and conduct projects. In addition to specialized knowledge and skills in programming, we tried to give them theoretical managerial knowledge on how to administer the process of creating a product, so that they would understand how to work on it. The tasks were related to one of our projects. One component of the project, designing a video analytics microservice, was given for self-study. In general, the participants did well, they studied a lot of information, gave us a lot of additional information, so they also helped us. Both they and us gained experience,” said Yevgeny Shatunov, Project Manager at Beta.

As part of the internship program, students were engaged in software development in Python and other computer languages, got acquainted with the ways of collecting functional requirements from customers and the basic principles of software architecture planning.

“During the internship, we got acquainted with the working process of the company, we witnessed live the real project development. At the same time, we studied various technologies and methods of solving problems, gradually preparing for implementation in the workflow. For example, we have learnt how to mark up a video for training a neural network that is used in a project.

The value of the experience gained in the internship was undoubted, since we were able to learn what computer development looks like outside the university, as well as we were able to prepare for the future job.

The internship was held online, but it was not a problem for us. Many employees work in the company remotely, so the company is well organized in terms of remote work. We used modern and convenient means of communication for developers. The work was well organized, the range and scope of tasks were relevant and interesting, the company’s specialists shared their experience and were always ready to address any questions,” says Artem Anashchenko.

During the internship, students got into real production conditions, which was especially useful for undergraduates.

“During the internship, we learned about the interaction features with the company in an online format – we worked through Slack (corporate messenger), as well as through Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket software. We had the opportunity to get acquainted with a certain set of technologies that the company’s employees used in the project, to offer our solutions.

During the entire internship period, we had regular meetings with the manager, where we discussed the results of the current tasks. Participation in such internships is very useful, as there is an opportunity to get acquainted with the experience of the company’s employees who have been working in the IT industry for several years. The impressions from the internship are extremely positive,” Dmitry Khoziainov shared.

This event is organized as part of the Kolarctic CBC DIT4BEARs project. The overall goal is to accelerate the adoption and transfer of breakthrough information technologies to meet the social and economic needs of the Barents Euro-Arctic region.