WIMTACH Student Profile: Tannus Esquerdo

“I feel more confident in my career at the moment because of the project I worked with at WIMTACH,” said Tannus Esquerdo, a recent alumnus from the WIMTACH student internship program. Reflecting on his internship at WIMTACH, Tannus noted that he gained what he set out to achieve from his internship: a strong sense of Front-end development techniques and the confidence to pursue any Canadian web development role.

When he first joined WIMTACH in October 2023, he was particularly excited for the opportunity to work with a stack that he enjoyed. He was first asked to join a project with Epipresto, a Montreal based grocery delivery company, and he used much of his education from Centennial College’s Software Engineering program to successfully contribute to the project. Tannus assisted the team with the Front-end development tasks for the creation of an electronic commerce platform and management system with the feature to capture digital images of grocery products. Once his role in the project was completed, he was also selected to be involved with the development of a web and mobile application for a project with Team Khartik along with a software migration project with Tenzr Health.

Since joining these projects, Tannus has acknowledged that his skillset has greatly improved and the major difference he noticed was his assurance in delivering good work. “I feel like I increased my confidence in building products,” he said. He learned how to program using different languages such as Typescript for the first time because of his internship and significantly, he was also encouraged to support other Student Researchers in project development. This leadership role helped him to gain the foundations of managing projects and it also taught him a lot about his skillset.

For the Tenzr Health project he played a role as a senior Student Researcher and he organized development meetings with his team and reviewed the work of other students. “The first time was kind of strange because … you have to know how to deliver feedback,” he said. Still, since this role required him to gain in-depth information about the project in order to provide useful guidance to other students, it forced him to develop his communication skills, a strong understanding of the structure of the project, and ultimately, the elements needed for any successful technology project. In general, this helped him to build a great relationship with the other student developers and improve his ability to work in a team. “For sure, because you face a lot of cultural challenges [or differences in] background experience … but you have to be open about feedback,” he said. Overcoming challenges in this role was key to his assurance about his career choice.

Moreover, working with other student developers with different experiences helped him to mature his approach to programming, and to consider long-term results while working. In particular, he developed a sense of programming that considered future developers who might continue on with his work after he has completed a task for a project. As a result, he has tried to create a smooth foundation for the next developers who are going to work on his projects at WIMTACH and he notes that overall, this approach to programming has helped him to enhance his code. “I try to keep up with this type of mentality and I think it’s a good approach,” he said.

Now that his internship is complete, Tannus highly recommends the program to other Centennial College students. He noted that his skillset improved significantly with just a few projects so he imagines that had he joined WIMTACH early on in his studies, he would have advanced even further. “I was lucky that I found this [internship] at the end of my semester at Centennial,” he said. “I improved a lot of my skills with only two projects.”

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