Adamou holds computer science internship at IBM
Nick Adamou will start his senior year with new insights and knowledge following his computer science internship.
He spent his summer as a software engineering intern at IBM under IBM’s Finance and Operations Department in Southbury, Connecticut.
The Connecticut native and member of the Cornell College men’s tennis team says he felt privileged to work on developing a critical piece of software and to see every angle of the creation process from coding to communicating with his team and monitoring the progress of the project.
“I worked on a large, multidisciplinary, worldwide team spanning from India, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, and the U.S. We were developing a piece of software called IBM’s Global Ledger User Interface Next Gen,” Adamou said. “It’s software designed to replace IBM’s aging ledger software. Their legacy ledger software had many problems that ultimately led to the necessity of rewriting the entire program in order for upper management to close each quarter more effectively.”
The Cornell College senior also participated in a hackathon during his internship, in which his team won under the category of community building. Adamou describes a hackathon as a competition in which teams work for an extended period of time, in this case, 24 hours, to develop a piece of software designed to satisfy a set of criteria. His team created an app called Down to Network.
“Essentially, this application encourages networking at a large corporation,” Adamou said. “Many of my co-workers have mentioned how difficult it is to meet talented individuals outside of their respective teams. We designed the app to have a ‘Tinder-like’ feel where you sign up, create an account, and tell the application about yourself and your intentions. The application uses an algorithm designed to connect users based on their role at IBM (intern, manager, etc) and the types of people that they would like to meet.”
Professor of Computer Science Leon Tabak said students who participated in summer internships learned a lot about the opportunities available to themselves and their classmates.
“They have better ideas about the kinds of organizations in which they would like to work and the roles they would like to take in those organizations,” Tabak said. “This expanded perspective is, at least as much as the technical skills they acquired, an important outcome of their experience.”
Adamou says he felt prepared for this internship because of Cornell’s block plan.
“Unlike traditional colleges or universities, Cornell allows me to be focused on one specific class for three and a half weeks, which flows naturally with the focus and rigors of the professional workplace that I have experienced at IBM this summer,” Adamou said.
The computer science major has learned about the importance of taking on individual projects outside of the classroom. He says his determination and passion to take on new technologies and software on his own time helped him get this internship.
