At nearly 18 I was in my first year of studies, and we had to do a 2 week intern ship in any company. A week before the start of the intern ship, I still hadn’t found a company I could do my intern ship at - or rather I hadn’t been searching one. One of my best friends dad happened to own a software company in Switzerland, and he agreed to hire me.
Life as a trainee there was excellent – they let me do real work, on internal products. The two weeks went great, and I asked if I could stay to work over the summer. The company being happy with my work so far, this wasn’t a problem at all and I worked there for 2 more month, mainly helping debugging a software used to sync user accounts between different systems.
Boy did I learn a lot about programming.
When in my second year I had to do another, longer intern ship, I very naturally went back to the CAD Rechenzentrum – and this time I worked on a client product. The company mainly produces a software for the state of Switzerland to manage their (many) bridges and tunnels. I worked on a map displayed in a webpage used to indicate the location of the different constructions, with map images that the company owned. You could pan the map, zoom in/out, and click the locations to get details on them – all of it done in javascript.