Category: Andrew

At my company, I would say I strived most in the areas of Data analysis and feature evaluation. I was really able to improve my skills in SQL and Excel more than I could have ever expected in two months of work. This section of my work also taught me about the importance of proper user management in application design. There are so many times where users have the option to mess with our data structure, not due to their own malice but instead do a faulty design in our record keeping programs that should not allow for this. This job also taught me the importance of the cloud but also the difficulties that come with integrating into it. However, I would say my personal application creation was very shoddy. It runs and it works but when I compare to the already implemented applications it seems like it goes through many different precautions that would not have been necessary with proper understanding of the field. Not only a greater understanding of computer science of course, but also with the unique packages and dependencies that I had to include with my specific application. I am grateful to work in a realistic scenario that deals with all parts of an app rather than a school designed project that leaves out many details to focus in on one. My skill set has definitely grown through this internship.

I am delighted to say my coding skills have increased but more than that, my coding is more practical in a work environment. Touching back on academic projects, there is a large difference between real world design and classroom design, this internship has taught me how to integrate into a real system and use the tools at my disposal to enhance my own design. My vocabulary and communication skills in my field have also improved, which may not be important to be productive, but can be important to convey your intelligence or your need for assistance. I would say my key takeaways from my internship is that work ethic is a universal trait. I have never worked with people as devoted to their production and that of the company before I started working at MoMo. I also learned a lot about the work environments in Vietnam but I would assume in most tech companies. It is refreshing to work with and meet people who are not so uptight whose attitudes reflect this. On a more personal note, I learned a lot about myself. I had never stepped outside of my comfort zone as much as I had on this trip. It was eye opening to me see how many different lands and people are out there in this surprisingly big world of ours. This fact makes me want to continue pursuing my education to be as well rounded not only academically but also culturally. 

The time I felt most achieved and proud at my internship was the success of my first big project in my email service that I completed a couple weeks ago. This project took me upwards of 3 weeks to complete at it involved, learning, planning, and coordinating with so many different aspects of software development that I had never used or touched before. This accomplishment struck me harder than any other because of my attention to detail and the solitude in which I tried to maintain in completing the project. The time it took me to go over every detail and connect it into our code database was much longer than expected but this only made me feel more satisfied when I was finally able to capture a request and send it as an email. I had done minor projects prior but it was all material I knew prior to starting my internship so it did not give me the same amount of fulfillment as this much larger project did. I would say my greatest accomplishment so far has been my ability to become an asset to my team at MoMo.

The first three weeks or so I was so slow and unaware of all the different tools I had at my fingertips that it would take me a long time to complete a task or require assistant from my team. Not to say I do not still ask for my coworkers help or opinion from time to time but I feel as if I am much more capable of handling the tasks given to me on my own and much more efficient in general. It’s nice to be apart of a real team that produces content and feel as if their success are aided by your help rather than the spectator I felt as first. Living in HCMC has taught me so many different ways of looking at life maybe not through my own lens but molding my lens through those of another. I definitely already say I was an empathetic person before I came to HCMC but I think this city has taught me the value of being empathetic. Being open minded has taught me that growing is much easier when you let in someone’s views who has experienced a certain situation for far longer. It also is much easier to make friends when you let yourself experience all the different things a place and its people have to offer and I would say it has helped me greatly to make so many friends at my work, despite how difficult it can be in terms of communication at times. Here’s a picture of me and my friend Phoung:

Working in the App development industry for the last month, it’s made me realize that the industry is all about making the user happy. This is a given for any industry but it is so excessively apparent here that I can not go a day without thinking about it for my own work or being told it for the teams work. Another aspect of the tech industry is the flexibility of the work.  Every one of our initiatives to improve the app is so innovative that it can be hard to foresee errors or the compatibility it will have with other mechanisms currently in the app. So, despite every bi-weekly meeting in place to update the status on activities and assign new ones, the provided are rather flexible. A strength of MoMo is its diligent management and the clarity on which their goals are passed onto the production teams. The stand up meetings we have everyday and the weekly meetings with the supervisor means that despite the size of the company, it can be very easy to reach out to coworkers or the management for support on an activity. This clarity helps with the functionality, as clearly knowing the end goal will not cause any mix ups in the production process. One weakness of the company is the rate at which it’s trying to innovate seems to be out pacing the cleanliness of the user interface.

There are so many features that are added on, on a monthly basis that either get bad reviews for changing the conventional home screen to accommodate for it, or get lost in the cloud of all the lists of features the app offers outside of the home screen that require some searching. Do the app trying to be an umbrella of all financial payments, it can be complicated for newer users to grasp rather than more basic financial apps like Venmo or PayPal that are one to one epay apps. The opportunity for growth in South East Asia for MoMo is practically limitless due to the app growing at a much faster rate than its competitors and the market being so large. One threat that MoMo could face is that if it greatly slows down its development process it could fall behind its competitors eventually leading to it fading away, such as Yahoo to Google. The most amazing moment that has happened to me so far was my coworkers inviting me to the mall during our work hours. During one of the more boring days, my coworkers asked if I wanted to go get food and walk around the mall with them. This doesn’t seem that great on paper but the inclusion and friendliness of it all was great. I also had a great time at the Bitexco Financial Tower from where I took this picture of the skyline:

The most challenging aspect of my job by far has to be the technical portion of it. As I touched upon in an earlier journal entry, my adjacent desk mates both have PhD’s in computer science and everyone else on the team has a master’s or is currently on track to get one. This has taught me what I believe many people interested in computer science have already known and that is the ability to search on one’s own to read up on different techniques or importation packages. This is made easier by the large base our team does much of our coding in so it can be easy at times to cross reference my code with someone who has already used similar functions but this only goes so far, especially since my packages are new to the database. This is also an opportunity for me to be placed in a situation where I can be very lost at times and not only compose myself to work forward, but to put on the facade of confidence. I know this is something many people figure out how to do when first put into any new situation so it is nice to learn this early in a real work setting.

The best feature of my internship is the connectivity of it all, from work to team building to outside the office. Work is much easier due to my ability to see everyone else’s code and pull similar but different import settings to build my own application. If it was not for the coding directory where we stored all of our work it would be so much harder to correct someone else’s work but also build one’s own. The sense of community here is also stronger than any I have ever experienced. I believe it stems from the culture but it is nice to be invited to all the clubs to try and become closer with the people in my office. Some of the clubs I have been invited to are running club, soccer club, English club, and movie club but I have only taken up the invites on soccer and English club (would have done the movie club if not for the Vietnamese dubbing). I have worked at a few places in the United States but none of them have felt this personal, I think this might be because the jobs I have worked have been menial food jobs where everyone usually is filled with constant despair. Although I think the major difference is the age range of my coworkers, here everyone is already in their late 20’s, so they feel a need to connect with their coworkers who might be friends or network associates for years to come.

The best food I have had in HCMC was this sushi buffet I went to with my work the second week. Amazing sushi with delicacies like octopus, squid, lobster and crab. I will never forget this place and will always think of it fondly. My work also serves great sticky rice but the repetition has gotten to me.

Not the best picture but this was the buffet:

Right now I am still working on the emailing service that will overhaul our current internal email system and when finished will be able to be accessed from anywhere on the MoMo servers similar to a google application. This project is almost done I just need help figuring out the final steps for closing the server when opened which my desk mates should be able to help with. This four weeks I honestly am not sure what I will be working on after our current project, but I do know that what I want to get out of this internship is concrete production that is my own brain child. Right now I am doing many minor projects which I know, from my boss telling me, are building up to a large scale one that will hopefully be introduced into the application. Regardless of if I have a substantial impact on the company overall when I am done with my internship here, I want to be able to point and physically show someone who is curious about what I was doing with my time here at MoMo. Describing content is usually way less tangible than displaying it. On top of this I want to learn, I have already learned more computer science skills than I did taking 5 classes in the department at UF.

Team building is greatly promoted here at MoMo so I am grateful that I am very close with my team, especially since some of the concepts here are so abstract that detailed explanations are necessary. In terms of strengths, I would say it is easy to spot my coworkers strengths as their impact parallels with their personality. My team that meets on a daily basis has one who communicates and delegates the bosses agenda, one who manages that data, one who communicates when problems to their origin department when encountered, two people who do much of the grunt work for the projects, and me. I think the strength of us as a team is our ability to set aside our projects to assist one another when at a roadblock. My strength, while not as tangible as my co workers with 4+ years each of post bachelor education, is my ability to learn and I think my teammates and supervisors recognize this.

One thing that really stick out to me when working in HCMC is the emphasis on employee well being. I am so used to being confronted by my supervisor at most jobs with a forklift of work or non-constructive criticism that is refreshing to see someone who legitimately only wants to make sure I am making progress. People are always too scared to come forward with problems due to the fear of seeing unintelligent to higher ups that they get stuck on small things that require help or in slower work habits. In computer science these small things can amount to hours of lost time if not assisted so I am grateful to have a supervisor and team that is there for each other when in distress. Also I think its weird here that holding the door open for a stranger or saying thank you for someone holding open the door for you just isn’t a thing here, especially since the culture is so nice and genuine outside of this.

I don’t have a picture of me and my team yet so here’s a picture I took of the golden bridge last weekend:

My supervisor’s name is Dung Hong and he is the head of the Machine Learning and Data Analysis department at MoMo but also the Vice President of the entire IT department. He is in charge of our team directly and meets with us once a week to get up to speed on the current status of each of our individual projects and their place in the overall app. He also takes care of relaying problems our team encounters that our out of reach which are usually resolved in the backend department. This department deals with all the memory placement and databases that are collected from day to day. His position as Vice President of the entire department makes him come and go quite frequently but with the weekly meetings and helpfulness of my adjacent co-workers, it never really affects me personally. My team specifically is the Machine Learning and Data Analysis sector of the company. We handle taking inputs from the user and developing programs that analyze these inputs, learn from them, and then suggest different tools to the user that are more likely to result in a transaction.

My role in the company right now is more of a learning based one than a content producer. My first four projects have been more to get me used to the development process from idea conception to full completion. My first week I worked on encryption and decryption by combining different databases on specific parameters to either add a layer of encryption or remove one. My second project was to move all of our transaction and user growth data in the month of May from the cloud into a local server and producing graphs for my supervisor to present to his higher ups during their monthly report. My third and current project is making an emailing service internally that will replace the current one that goes straight to spam for many people. Work is clear with strict deadlines but allots for a large amount of freedom as long as you meet the deadlines. 9-11:30 is working on projects and then 11:30 is a stand up meeting between my team to discuss our current accomplishments and downfalls of the day and our plan for the rest of the day. From then, noon to 1:30 is lunch usually with an excess 45 minutes that allows for unwinding and napping. The rest of the day to 6 is continuing to work on projects.

The most surprising thing that happened to me so far was when I was leaving work this Tuesday a little bit later than normal and my coworker walked up and asked if I wanted to play soccer with 20 or so people on the IT team. Here’s a picture of our skype group message that I was added into the day after.

The company I am working for is the app, MoMo. I am currently on their analytics and engineering team. My company is a Fin-tech app which deals with financial transactions between user to user and user to merchant. My app is unique in the convenience it provides. It serves a universal platform for paying all different expenses from grab to food trucks to hotels to bills. My company’s primary service is to allow a one stop shop for paying any sort of finances that need to be covered.

Working at MoMo has without a doubt been the most complex company I have ever been associated with in the depth each sector of the company has and how these sectors translate into their functionality in the app. However, the complexity of the company and the magnitude of the growth the company is currently undergoing, does not stop the company from maintaining a small startup type atmosphere. Everyone in the office knows everyone else and still maintains strong friendships in and out of the workplace. This would usually result in a clique-like mentality in most work environments but I have never felt so welcomed as I have at MoMo, my boss checks on me once every hour or two not only to check my progress but more to make sure I am not lost and too afraid to ask for help. My desk mates are also extremely open to helping whenever I am lost and have no difficulty in stopping their train of thought with whatever smaller task I might need help with. This genuine kindness is shared among all who work in my office and lunch is almost always a pleasure of people showing me different hole in the wall restaurants.

The best way I could describe the cultural in my office is a constant feeling of respect between all workers. I believe this comes from the level of education each worker achieved to get their position in the company. The people to the left and right of me are both PhD holders, one in computer science and the other in industrial engineering, and almost everyone else in my sector of the office is a master’s graduate in computer science. In my department there is only 21 people but the whole office building and adjacent one hold a total of over 400 MoMo employees. The layout is about what you would expect in an IT office, with long desks and each person given a computer but MoMo contrasts this cliche with constant interaction from one worker to another. Orientation was honestly non-existent, right now they are about to launch a new update on the app to add a few new features so I believe I wasn’t given much of a orientation due to the hecticness of trying to complete this task. My job currently is more to prepare the datasets that this update will affect as for my boss to prevent its success or failure to the rest of the company.

The most informative event that took place for culture week for me was the Broward street food crawl. This was the most informative for me because it helped me identify the correct way to approach different aspects of Vietnam such as crossing the street, paying a bill, and how to request different customer services at a restaurant correctly. I also enjoyed the Broward tour because of how close in age we were with all the other students, it really made me bridge the gap of the cultures and all the similarities between our train of thought and interests rather than focusing on the differences. This experience also showed me the beauty of the streets here, I attached a view of my view from my restaurant which mimics one of NY. My first impressions of Vietnam were so much greater than I could have ever imagined.

This country is so much greater than I could have ever imagined. It might be my American bias coming into play but when I imagined Southeastern Asia, I was worried about poverty and waste in all corners of the city but instead I was greeted with some of the most beautiful places and people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. The people here are so open about their beliefs and their culture that its a treat to walk anywhere or speak to anyone. Along with this the city itself is so vibrant at almost all hours of the day. The strangest and most interesting part to me about Vietnam is its ability to be developing at such a fast rate and yet still hold onto their identity. There is still temples littered around the city in downtown and rural regions. Touching back on the beautiful people, the sense of community here is stronger than anywhere I have seen with the locals constantly populating the park to play badminton, futbol, or even shuttlecock. I think this arises from the large investments put into the public park system here which are utilized to their fullest by the local families and school systems.

Along with this, I believe the sense of community extends from the large numbers of scooters in the city which allow people to stop and park anywhere making somewhat difficult places to reach due parking concerns not a hassle at all. I have attached a picture of the scooter masses working through the crazy streets. One question I would like to see is the people’s view on Vietnam from within. I know in the United States people’s view of the government has been untrustworthy as of late, and I wonder if this is a shared sentiment with the people especially from a nation with even more of a tyrannical system than the United States. Another question I would like to answer is the people’s outlook on romance here. I know from my personal experience that people spend their entire lives trying to find the one and can lose their direction due to it. This is something that seems to be promoted in our culture through media and entertainment. I am wondering if this type of romance or die unhappy is a similar sentiment here in Vietnam.