I’ve done a few internships before this one, so I thought I had a pretty good sense of what to expect walking into Courier Health this summer. I was wrong, in a good way.

What surprised me about how a startup actually runs

This was the first startup that I worked for that was a little farther down the line.The thing that stood out most to me, more than any specific project, was how much freedom I had as an intern. At past internships with bigger teams, I felt like I had to go through layers of approval before touching anything. Here, if I noticed something that looked off, I could just start working on a fix, present it straight to my PM (shoutout Christine), and a PR could be shipped the same day. Nobody’s title determined how much impact they could have (well, except when it came to prod access, for obvious reasons).

With that freedom came the responsibility and I think together they really fed into making me really feel like part of the work being done, instead of just an employee.

From day one, the friendliness and atmosphere in the office was what caught me off guard at first. From the random conversations around our desks in the middle of the day to getting consistently destroyed in the #tiny-games Slack channel. So many parts of my experience here just screamed that it was “different” here compared to my last few companies (and that I need to get better at geography).

The problem I actually got to work on

After my first week in, my fellow intern Olivia and I were taken through a week of discovery to learn about some of the issues we needed solving for Workflows to help free up Client Solutions (CS) and Customer Engineering (CE) capacity.

This summer we shipped a revamped criteria creation flow, including a brand new review step that gives insight into exactly which patients in the system would be included by a new criteria. The criteria tester also got a big revamp (kudos to Olivia for a lot of this one!) to give greater visibility to CS. Part of this revamp, one of the biggest visual changes was moving from modals to a new flyout/drawer component that I had the pleasure of implementing (including some fun animations).

I also got to prototype new AND/OR logic for the criteria builder, a big change to criteria building at its core that gives CS more freedom to get granular and more usable with the criteria they create.

Throughout the whole summer, I could always see the impact that my work was having and that fed into me wanting to keep working on new things.

What are Workflows?
Workflows allow customers to automate laborious tasks, like sending out emails to certain groups based on certain events or surfacing actions that need to be taken.

The table redesign, and the time I broke things

I also worked on a table redesign, specifically the bulk styling changes across our new table component. This was, without question, the highest blast-radius thing I touched all summer (but also one of my favorites), and it taught me that the hard way.

At one point, an update I shipped ended up blocking the CS team and I didn’t find out until the next morning. Another Engineer rolled back the change so CS could keep working, and the second I found out, I dropped everything to work on a fix and shipped it that same day.

The root cause was an empty state I hadn’t tested. It sounds small, but in hindsight I think it highlighted the responsibility I felt for my work and that what matters is not that you made a mistake but how you respond to it.

Dev Note: Always test all the paths even if you expect it to work the same as everywhere else and think about the impact your work can have in conjunction with the whole system even if it feels like one small part.

Shoutout to Jerry and Adam, who I worked alongside on this one and for the chance to help out on this super fun part of my summer.

What I’d tell next year’s interns

This will be one of your top 2 internships and at least top 5 teams you’ll be apart of. If you’ve only worked at big corporations, you should throw out all your preconceptions about asking for permission before working on something or that you are confined to whatever tickets you’re given. Here, if you’re interested in working on something, it’s only one slack message away.

This internship is a great fit for people who genuinely enjoy the work that they do. It’s the full experience of what it’s like to really build a product with a team and see the impact it gets to make. You get real ownership, real responsibility, real consequences, and you learn a lot faster because of it.

Andy Lin is a 4th year at RIT, pursuing a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Software Engineering.