A summer internship at Airblox, an air cargo marketplace startup in Chicago, during the MS program.

Built a full-stack task management application: React frontend, Node.js/PostgreSQL backend, with varying levels of task priority and severity. Aided in the creation of a resource-efficient ETL flow on top of the existing cloud infrastructure.

The most interesting work: user journey experiences to support internationalization, enabling application features in 5 languages and expanding the addressable market by 40%. Internationalizing an application touches every layer — string extraction, locale-aware formatting, bidirectional text, fallback chains. Doing it properly is a systems problem, not just a translation problem.

A startup environment mid-graduate-school: shipping fast, wearing multiple hats, and seeing the direct impact of engineering decisions on the product.