An internship is the most effective way to develop your skills in an authentic work environment. It is the first step toward building your professional path. At Fintech Market, you'll be able to work in a comfortable environment with people from different nationalities, fun events, flexible working hours, and challenging but exciting projects. 

In this post, we're sharing some thoughts from Martin, Karl, and Artur, our Software Engineer interns who joined us at our offices in Tartu and Tallinn.

Martin is a computer science student at the University of Tartu. He joined us at the beginning of summer, and in these months, he has been learning and facing new challenges that can be useful in his future. About his internship expectations, he said: “When I started my internship, I was not sure what to expect. I wanted to get some hands-on experience in the industry and get to know people. Both of these definitely happened."

In addition, he described what he’s been experiencing these past months: “I’ve learned a lot about a real dev team’s workflow, as this is something I had no experience with before. It's something I will 100% take with me no matter what project I am working on. I also learned a lot about Ruby and Rails and how to think within them and how to think with a more 'fintech' mindset in general.”

About recommending our internship to other students Martin said:  “I would definitely recommend this internship to another student. Fintech Market has a really closely-knit team, where learning something new is always valued. By doing your internship here, you will definitely learn a lot about Rails, how the fintech industry works, you will make new friends and connections.”

If you join our team as an intern, you’ll have to face real tasks, and have true responsibilities as our other team members. We want to provide the full experience like our CTO, Siim Liiser said: “We try to give our interns experience in a real work environment. Working on dummy projects might be easier to get into at first, but it will not show you the struggles you might run into working on an actual codebase. Working on a real product will show you what one looks like, what issues you might face working, and also see the fruits of your effort when the feature you've been working on is delivered to customers.”

The internship experience gives you the chance to boost your strengths and improve your weaknesses like Karl said: “I think my time at FTM gave me a clear understanding of what working as a developer looks and feels like. The internship taught me a lot about how to approach issues, where to look for help when in need and what are my current strengths and weaknesses.”

Karl, who is also a computer science student at the University of Tartu, shared what were some of the main challenges he faced during his internship: “the first challenge was to adapt to a totally new language (Ruby) which I was not familiar with, alongside a codebase 1000 times bigger than I had ever seen/worked on before.”

“I would say the most challenging part was navigating and understanding the flow of the whole application/codebase. There were even times when finding the location of the issue itself took longer than actually fixing it.” He added.

To complete our summer interns this year, we have Artur, he’s a Cybersecurity student at TalTech, he joined us for a couple of months, and about his internship he said: "It was a really great summer experience, to learn how to work with a real product, and to soak a lot of knowledge from my colleagues. I learned about proper error handling, Vue, small UX details and general project architecture."

If you're considering an internship but you don't feel sure yet or have doubts, we have some exciting news for you! We are ready to help you with this new challenge. We want our interns to feel comfortable and confident, so they can learn with us with real work tasks and be completely part of our team.