My Co-op Experience at VETRO, Inc.
Written by Daniel Finelli, Masters of Computer Science candidate at Northeastern University.
Daniel Finelli joined the VETRO team in January of 2021 as a Masters of Computer Science candidate at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University here in Portland, Maine. In his six months with VETRO, Daniel accomplished a lot with our team, bringing a range of skills, experience and motivation to his work. We truly appreciate his contributions. Check out Daniel’s reflection on his time at VETRO below, and check out our careers page for new openings updated daily.
In January I started as a Software Engineer co-op intern at the SaaS software company VETRO, Inc. through their partnership with The Roux Institute and Northeastern University. In this post I’ll share my background and my co-op experience.
Portland, Maine’s Roux Institute at Northeastern offers a unique model for graduate education that incorporates career development throughout the program. During the master’s degree program, students complete a co-op internship to develop and refine real-world skills.
As a business and political science undergraduate student at Northeastern, I had two co-op experiences working with GIS technology. For my first co-op, I designed heat maps, drive-time analysis, and other geospatial visualizations in ArcGIS for a commercial real estate company. At my second co-op at Boston Public Library, I digitized historic atlases and developed interactive web maps using Leaflet. Working with GIS and web design motivated me to get my master’s degree in computer science and take classes ranging from database management to web development.
VETRO interested me while I was searching for my master’s degree co-op because it blended my background in geospatial technology and software engineering. As a Software Engineer Co-op student, I was quickly welcomed and treated as any other engineer. Working in an agile environment with a team of inventive engineers has given me insight into the entire software development lifecycle. I have been able to work with modern technologies and develop innovative features.
I have learned to utilize our entire tech stack, including technologies new to me such as PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Node.js, and Vue.js. The team I work with focuses on a fiber management tool that lets users visualize and build fiber cable connections, typically for fiber optic broadband network applications.
During the co-op, I worked on front-end features like reconfiguring a panel for connecting fiber cables. For this project, I had to update typical UI elements like buttons and links.
Other features I worked on include backend and database interactions, such as altering APIs used to send cable and equipment data. An opportunity that I really enjoyed was writing some database queries for these APIs and migrating data for schema changes. Working on these projects across the technology stack has challenged me and expanded my skills immensely.
It has been a pleasure working with the collaborative team at VETRO to solve challenging problems. The entire company is dedicated to innovation within the telecommunications infrastructure industry. In addition to my own personal growth, it is rewarding to work on technology that will expand internet access, connect more people, and make information more widely available.
