I got an internship through CUNY's Internship to Employment (I2E) program at a company called VegBoom Corp! Full-time, all summer. My first real tech job that wasn't freelancing for schools.
They had me build a full-stack web application, the whole thing, from concept to pre-launch. React, Next.js, Express, Node, TypeScript, PostgreSQL. I set up the database, built the API, did the frontend, wired up auth. The works!
I'm not going to lie, the first week was overwhelming. I'd done full-stack stuff in tutorials and personal projects but this was different. There were standups, code reviews, sprint planning. Someone was actually going to look at my code and have opinions about it. That was terrifying at first and then quickly became the most useful thing about the whole experience.
By the end of the summer, the app was reducing user research time by about 60% and we got 95% positive feedback in pre-launch testing! Those numbers came from actual user surveys, not my imagination.
I presented the whole thing at the I2E Alumni End of Internship Review in August. I remember walking out afterward thinking: OK, I can do this. I can actually do this for a living! It wasn't imposter syndrome talking for once.
Something else was brewing too, but I didn't know it yet.