As a young company,Ubiq, is making smart use of the cheaper, proximate labour available through the intern programs of the University of Waterloo (UW). I can consider myself among the few to be fortunate enough to have worked there. As of now, the six person company tends to take on one intern every four months. If you are lucky enough to join the team, you will gain vast experience through autonomy and necessity.
The breadth of software systems required by their vision of the modern meeting room demands that a small team be spread very thinly. Jayanth Kottapalli, the more technically inclined of the two founders, will stretch himself across and manage all of the offerings of the company while delegating the majority of development to dedicated employees. For example, Ubiq’s flagship product is a meeting room tool that allows for you, the presenter, to rapidly and wirelessly connect and stream your device monitor to the meeting room projector. This involves both native applications, one per supported operating system, and the application on the Ubiq device that allows for this connection and streaming. Simultaneously, their biggest selling point to IT departments is that through their Dashboard – a Web Application – you can easily and quickly configure and monitor your devices. The result is that, as an intern, their requirements of you can be comprehensive. It is a challenge that you must be ready for.
However, their expectations are not that you be competent upon arrival, although they would probably prefer competency some related field. I submit the example of my original employment. I was employee number one. This may seem confusing, however, as a nascent company, before the original founder Sumit Pasupalak brought on Jay as his co-founder, he had already begun taking advantage of UW’s Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (BETs) program. They, BETs, provide heavily subsidized employment for first year engineering students. I was once, one of these students. It was here, having had little to no training or experience in software development, that I was tasked with building the original iOS application for streaming presentations to the Ubiq device. Their investment in their employees, in particular their interns, is incredible.
Their only expectation is that you come to work with an open mind ready to learn and to commit yourself to the given project. They require you to learn fast and to apply this learning as rapidly. As a start-up, iteration and improvement must be constant. So, you, as a learner, must provide your time. This is the real cost, but if you believe that your work experiences should be about more than making money and having more free time than during the school semester, this is the place for you. I, inexperienced as I am or was, cannot believe that the tradeoff be more fair. With this, if you think yourself ready, I implore you to apply – you will not regret it.
