Meet Vera Antonov, Summer intern at Sectra Communications
Vera’s education: Bachelor’s degree in Programming with a master’s degree in Computer Science
What was the focus of your master thesis at Sectra?
I was studying a course in safety analysis when a friend told me about a CTF-event that Sectra held each year. I signed up and during the evening we got to solve a bunch of problems, talk to people with a passion for security and also eat some pizza. After the event, I started to wonder what it would be like working with this and applied not only because of my interest in security but also due to my eagerness to know more about “real life” after my studies. 
What did you do at Sectra?
During the summers of 2019 and 2020, I worked as an intern at Sectra Communications for 8 weeks. I got to work with 3 other students developing the usability and the user experience for Sectra’s Tiger/R. We did a lot of development for Android both summers and during the latest one, I got to try a more team-leading role.
I really enjoyed my time at Sectra and the technology spurred a great deal of interest for me. Also I got to work with “real” problems which gave me the feeling that Sectra’s summer internship was very serious.
What did you like most about Sectra’s summer internship?
That would definitely be how the task that we were given connected to reality! As a summer intern at Sectra, you get to solve problems that the ordinary team has, which gave me as a student a huge insight into how the things that I get to learn at the university will be implemented in my future work life. Also, we got to work with the ordinary team of Sectra employees, which made it easy to ask them questions and see how they work, as well as for the ordinary team to ask us questions.
You were a summer intern two years in a row, what made you come back?
I really enjoyed my time at Sectra and the technology spurred a great deal of interest for me. Also, as I mentioned before, I got to work with “real” problems which gave me the feeling that Sectra’s summer internship was very serious. It allowed me to learn a lot that I could use in my final year of master’s studies as well as after I graduate.
Have you gained any new experience or knowledge which you can benefit from completing your master’s at the university?
I would say that the way that we have been working with scrum meetings and agile methods, such as working both retroactively and proactively with the planning as well as managing our time has been very insightful.
When developing, the team made paper prototypes during the summer of 2020 before starting programming. The functions that we had been working on were tested on colleagues at the company, which gave me an understanding of how to work effectively with problems and tasks.
Lastly, the importance of teamwork to complete a task was made very clear to me. At school, I got the feeling that quite a few fellow students preferred working alone when solving problems, like during a lab session, but at Sectra I have really learned to appreciate, through experience, the strength of working with a team.
What do you want to do after you graduate?
Oh, that was quite a difficult question, but I would say that I want to work with a product that I find important, like for example something that helps society or that could make a difference for people.
