Arthrex Intern Recognized on Top 100 List

08/21/2018

Arthrex Intern Recognized on Top 100 List

Congratulations to Software Quality Assurance intern Christian Vazquez, who was recognized on the WayUp Intern 100 list on August 10. WayUp, a job search website for students and recent graduates, accepts nominations from all over the country and uses votes and a panel of judges to determine the 100 best interns in the U.S. Interns are selected based on work ethic, reliability, attention to detail, contribution to major projects and more.

Christian has been interning in GIS since April and is a rising senior majoring in software engineering at FGCU. We sat down with him to talk about his recognition, his role at Arthrex and what’s next for him.

How did it feel to find out that you made the WayUp Intern 100 list?

Completely surreal. It actually still does. People here at Arthrex have been congratulating me and I feel so grateful and very humbled by the acknowledgement from so many esteemed people. It’s crazy that people are recognizing me and saying congrats.

Who nominated you for the top 100 list?

My manager, Diane Mills (Senior Manager, Software Quality Assurance), nominated me. She was so nice and supportive. After being nominated, I went through the application process, explaining what my daily tasks are, how I contribute to my team’s major projects and so on. I honestly feel like I made the list because I had so many mentors and people who believed in me enough to encourage me to try. This is really thanks to all of them!

What made you want to apply for your internship at Arthrex?

I knew I really wanted to get a competitive internship this summer. My professors kept saying that the summer between your junior and senior year of college is extremely important for interning and on-the-job learning. I started applying for a lot of different internships, but I became really interested in Arthrex after learning that there were a lot of relevant opportunities. I had known that Arthrex was a medical device manufacturing company, but I was intrigued when I started to learn more about the company and all the different departments.

What do you work on as a software QA intern?

Working in software QA, we do a lot of manual regression testing, which is taking a new feature that’s still in development and testing to see if it causes any existing features, or the application as a whole, to crash. Basically, the goal is to ensure that this new feature will work well with the ones we already have in place. We also test the live apps by finding ways to force them to crash, which can be challenging. By doing this, we are minimizing the issues a user could face while using the apps.

I also worked on automation scripting, which was sort of unexpected. I was able to make the test creation process more efficient when working on language translations. By understanding the components of the Surgeon App and taking what is known as an “object repository” for one particular language, I utilized that existing repository for the other languages that the app needed to appear in. What used to take several days to test for each language is now able to be completed in just a few hours. I think I was just able to do it since I had fresh eyes on the project, but my mentors, Shobana Singh (Software QA II) and Blanca DiBenedetto (SQA Analyst III), as well as my manager, were very helpful. They are all brilliant and I’m thankful for them giving me this opportunity.

What is the most valuable thing you learned during your internship?

I learned exactly what I want out of a career and a workplace. I got to come to work every day this summer and be surrounded by wonderful, down-to-earth people who inspired me to be my best. I get to work on fun and exciting projects in technology that I’m truly interested in and it doesn’t even feel like I’m at work.

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