Hard Yards is pleased to announce our three summer interns! For the past nine weeks, Adi Pillai, Cooper Devito, and Maddie Eason have assisted the team with data science, software engineering, and digital marketing, respectively.
All three are students at the University of Virginia and were participants of Launch, a competitive internship placement program run by Forge. Forge is a non-profit that prepares students with the modern skills they need to make an impact in the world. Their mission is to empower students to realize their own potential while creating opportunities for them to make an impact for good.
To kick off their internships, the Hard Yards team spent two nights at the Virginia International Raceway. The purpose of this offsite was to conduct initial briefings and to bond as a team. This was the first in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic, so morale was high across the board.
On the second day of the offsite, we completed a tactical driving session on the high-speed race track. We then took those skills to the smaller, yet no less competitive, go-karting track for some friendly...and slightly aggressive racing. Thankfully, no interns were harmed.
Adi, Cooper, Maddie, and our tactical driving instructor inside a beater car.
Cooper, our software engineering intern, has spent his time centered around internal research and design in regards to a data pipeline project. More recently, he has been working on a design sprint and getting to interface with clients throughout the design process.
“My favorite thing about working for Hard Yards has been the people. At the end of the day, that’s really the most meaningful thing. Surround yourself with good people who challenge you and help you grow by exposing you to new ideas.”
- Cooper Devito
Maddie, our digital marketing intern, has been working on building out a repeatable and efficient marketing and commercial sales plan, creating and putting out content, and improving onsite SEO.
“It is one thing to learn skills in a classroom setting, but to actually apply those skills to the real world has been the best learning experience. The Hard Yards team is full of passionate and hard-working people, working alongside them has been inspiring.”
- Maddie Eason
Throughout his data science internship at Hard Yards, Adi has spent his time developing the entire pipeline from accessing client enterprise process data to building out Agile visualizations in various BI tools. He also was able to strengthen his Python skills through work on data conditioning/transformation algorithms, programming the Jira REST API in Python to retrieve the backend data we needed, and connecting to databases with Python.
"What I am most proud of contributing to Hard Yards is concrete digitization of their efforts to expand into the world of data literacy in their consulting services. A core service of Hard Yards is consulting on project management and workflows; the work I've done, I hope, will set the stage for them to apply data-driven analysis on client processes in a new, easily repeatable manner to inform changes that need to be made."
-Adi Pillai
We are looking forward to continuing our work with Adi, Cooper, and Maddie for the remainder of their time at Hard Yards and we wish them the best of luck with their studies in the fall at the University of Virginia.