WIMTACH Student Profile: Ayesha Azim

Ayesha Azim is fascinated with software development, how websites are constructed, and especially, how Artificial Intelligence fits into all of this. That’s why she decided to apply for Centennial College’s Software Engineering Technology program, with a concentration on AI and Computer Software Engineering. When she learned about WIMTACH from a professor in one of her courses, she was excited to apply for a Student Researcher role and bring all of these interests together.

A member of the WIMTACH team since September 2023, she has been involved in many projects. Some of these projects were for industry partners like Epipresto, Team Karthik, Dolce and Gourmando, and Cassidy E-Care. “Joining [WIMTACH] was the best thing that I could have ever done because I got a lot of support from the team,” she said. “I initially didn’t have any confidence.”

With each new project, her involvement helped her to build the technical and communication skills needed to thrive and the self-assurance to take on different roles. She first contributed to a project collaboration with Epipresto, a project which centered on the development of an Optical Character Recognition capturing and management system. Acting as a Quality Assurance person for this project, she was responsible for testing functionalities and maintaining test cases. She also communicated with other student developers to fix bugs and provided weekly demonstrations to the industry partner. After the completion of the Epipresto project, she was assigned to assist with the development of a human resources application for Team Karthik. In this role, she assisted with requirements gathering, project analysis and acted as a system technology analyst, regularly assessing the technologies that would be useful for the successful development of the application as well as assisting with procuring required resources.

With these experiences under her belt, she eventually assisted with Business Analysis and Quality Assurance requirements for the project, performing a wide variety of tasks including scheduling meetings, creating backlogs, and setting timelines for the completion of tasks. With knowledge from the Karthik project, she was able to excel as a Business Analyst and Quality Assurance person for a project collaboration with Dolce and Gourmando in the development of a management tracking system for the company’s product database. She also had the opportunity to shadow senior student Back-end developers in this role. “Initially, I didn’t open up that much because I wasn’t comfortable working in teams because earlier, I was working all by myself … but this is the first time I was working [in] a team in a professional environment,” she said.

Since her ultimate goal is to become a back-end developer within the AI development industry, her internship at WIMTACH has been the best catalyst to enhance her development skills. Often contributing to three or more projects simultaneously, Ayesha has been able to develop a deep understanding of software development project cycles and has learned how to develop with different technology stacks, libraries, and languages, and particularly, programming with Angular, React, Microsoft Azure, Dot Net, and C Sharp.

Working in a development team with other Student Researchers has been an enriching experience for her because she has been able to learn from skilled student developers from different cultural backgrounds and gained exposure to different approaches to development. In fact, she had the opportunity to shadow other senior student developers during their work and participate in a variety of project meetings in addition to her assigned projects to gain a sense of how projects are developed for different industries. “I feel like after doing this internship, I’ve put my hands on everywhere, every part of the software technology industry basically,” she said. “I have gained a lot of experience … it gave me a broad overview of how the team works.” She has even had the chance to contribute to the organization of hackathons for industry partners like TTC.

Often her proudest instances during her training were those moments where she was presenting demonstrations to industry partners and seeing their positive feedback after contributing hours of hard work towards a project. “It’s like they get something that they really appreciate and that appreciation is a really great moment,” she said.

Ayesha is so pleased with her experiential learning experience at WIMTACH, she is continuing to learn with the team. Now, she is assisting the team with a project with Tenzr Health, centered on the creation of a cloud-based responsive web application to support the recovery of health care patients dealing with injuries and she is also slated to assist the WIMTACH team with an upcoming project with Academy of Learning. For this project, she has been enabled to take programming courses in preparation for the development skills that are required and she is enjoying the chance to really hone in on the technical back-end development skills she wants. “The best thing about the program is there are no prerequisites, it teaches everything from scratch and you get a lot of hands-on experience,” she said.

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