Zeal IT Consultants
First internship experience May 2025 - August 2025
Date: 8/18/25
I'm currently writing this as my internship has come to a close for the summer of 2025 🥲. It has been an amazing experience to intern at Zeal IT Consultants this past summer, and I have grown in numerous ways. I am so glad to have been working on the Trinity Industries AMS project, and in my own words.
"I need to see this through...this code is my kid now and I need to see my kid grow up." -Ashwin Iyer
Onboarding
I was a front-end developer intern and worked on the Trinity Industries AMS project. To be honest, onboarding was rough; I felt out of place as the intern, and that feeling resulted in the feeling of having to "prove myself." To make matters worse, I was given the first company laptop from Trinity Industries, while the rest of the team had to wait. This felt awkward, as nobody knew if I could even code... I took it upon myself to make solutions, so that night I went back to my roots of "hacking" my school laptop and was able to set up Node.js and NPM by utilizing their respective binaries. The team was so impressed and it allowed the UI team to start development a week earlier than anticipated.
Development
I thought I would be shuffling papers or moving cables, but I worked on a project! This was the time to "prove myself," so I took that and ran. I immediately took on a 5-point story and started development, and was the first developer to show a story in a sprint demo with the client. This was a huge moment for me and the team, as they felt as if they could count on me to develop and deliver results. From then on, I was given more responsibilities and became a key member of the UI team.
I often worked overtime and put my best foot forward to ensure that I delivered quality work. I had remembered a message from my dad that his developers "put no pride in their work; they call the day at 5 pm even though the server is down." I did not want that to be me. Before sprint demos, I would get API endpoints and be ready to develop them throughout the night at the office, as I wanted to showcase the backend developers' efforts. I even worked a few weekends to make sure I could deliver extra each sprint. I learned that,
I loved my time at Zeal, and it put lots of pressure on me, but with pressure and heat comes growth. Thank you again to everyone I met at Zeal, the Trinity team at Zeal, and everyone I met at Trinity Industries. I hope to see this project come to fruition and am looking to new seas in the world of finance.