I don’t know what July 14th might mean to other people, but to me, it means a lot: the last day of my first job!

In the past month, I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to work in the VeriGuide team with some amazing people to make a plagiarism detection system for teachers and students in school to use. My main job was to integrate the already-completed system with Moodle, a Learning Management System that has quite a lot of market shares in schools today, with some minor addition such as beautifying and tweaking interfaces and what not.

For pretty much the whole month, I’ve been waking up at 7 (while all you sleep till like 12), show up at office by 9:30, work for 2 hours, go to lunch, work again for like 5 hours and go home. Yeah, the regularity of my holidays was pretty much like school, and I gotta tell you, it has been driving me crazy, at least for the first couple of days.

That said, it has still been a fantastic experience for me. Not only did I get to improve on technical details (by working with some other nerds and dealing with multiple languages between PHP, XML, JSP, and Java), I also had to do some critical thinking “exercises” and learned how to communicate with other people effectively. We organized ourselves with Google Docs (which were amazingly helpful, I finally realized), held some discussions in our tiny office (which was also used by some grad students for their research work under the same prof), and made this work experience not only about codes, but also about interaction with people and team-building – something that I could not have otherwise learned.

Lastly, the amazing people that I was working with is probably what made my month so great. I had so much fun just working, talking and even taking after-lunch chilling breaks with them – so thanks a lot!

Now on my last day, I’m kinda happy because I’m now (kinda) free; but I say I’m definitely going to miss what has happened during the past month in a small office at CUHK. Keep in touch!