Trailblazer Profile: Sam Javed

Name: Sam Javed

School: HSE High School

Major: N/A

Age: 17

Sam is one of our youngest Trailblazer interns who is going into his senior year in high school. We found out about Sam from one of his teachers who contacted one of our Flexware employees (who happened to be a friend) saying Flexware should consider hiring Sam for the summer. While we normally don’t hire high school students, we made an exception because we were really impressed with Sam’s technical abilities.

This summer Sam has had the pleasure of working with different Flexware engineers on multiple different mini projects. Sam also provides a good glimpse of how encouraging the Flexware environment is, even if you do not have a declared major or are new to the field.

What project are you currently working on?

I’m working on a project for Flexware engineers which allows them to point the program at a database and convert all the data available to models which are required for every project. Prior to this project, this process was done manually and would take up hours; this can now be done in a few seconds.

How did this project come about?

The idea of this project came up when engineers discussed the redundancy of having to manually create models over and over again for a single project.

What do you do in a typical day for this project?

I look at sample models and databases and write the program to translate between the two automatically.

How has this project been easier or harder than your presumptions going into it?

I initially expected the project to be much harder than it turned out to be. I think it was because I wasn’t really familiar with databases before but now I am comfortable enough to work with them.

How has your experience in this internship differed from your preconceived ideas about internships in general?

I did not expect myself to be working on such high importance and exciting projects. I always thought interns work on side projects that have little value to the company and do it for the experience but I am always working on projects that are exciting, are of high importance to the company, and allow me to learn a lot about the topics.

How has this internship grown you as an individual and helped you in your career path?

It’s helped me see what the Computer Science field is actually like and what my daily life would be like working after college. It’s also helped me learn things that I otherwise would have had to pay for in college to learn. It’s helped me realize how important it is to work in teams and coordinate on projects. I was given two weeks to complete the project and so far I am on track.