If you are interested in applying for an internship, we start recruiting in March or earlier.  Send an email  to Richard Cichelli  cichelli@newspapersystems.com.

INTERNSHIPS AT SCS:
Software Consulting Services, LLC (SCS) internships are open to highly motivated Computer Science majors interested in contributing knowledge and skills to the continued development of our newspaper publishing systems.

Applicants should be able to understand the technical challenges of assigned projects, be able to provide feedback and potential solutions, and be able to implement robust solutions using programming skills.

SCS specializes in software development, systems engineering and integration, technical support and training. SCS is a value-added reseller for equipment suppliers like Dell and software suppliers like Red Hat, Microsoft, the SCO Group, Apple, Sun, Quark and Adobe. SCS applications run on various networked computer platforms, including Linux®, Unix and Windows® servers with Windows® 7/8/2008/2012, Macintosh, Linux and Unix clients.

INTERN TESTIMONIALS:

Emily Ebling

I was presented with the opportunity to work for SCS as an intern over the summer of 2017. This was a new experience for me, as I had never worked in the computer science field before. The first week was spent learning the ins and outs of SCS's custom programming language. Soon enough I felt confident to start working on my first project thanks to the supervision of Bob Harwick.

I was tasked with separating the standby ad system (StandbyAdBoss) from the layout (Layout-8000) system. In doing so, the standby ad system could be used as a microservice on its own, thus allowing additional applications to use the system. I initially wrote small programs dealing with the different actions that the standby ad system should be able to handle by itself, and once I had those written I was able to incorporate them into SCS’s interface technology.
Overall this experience was incredible, and I was doing so much more than I had ever expected. It was very rewarding knowing that I was doing work that actually mattered to SCS and being able to see my results at the end of my internship. Ultimately, I learned a lot about both programming and myself through this internship, and I'm happy to say I made the right decision in entering the computer science field.

Emily Ebling
Elizabethtown College
Computer Science Student
Summer 2017 Intern


Daniel Qian

I'll be honest, my first week or so at SCS was a little disappointing. I had gotten the internship by doing a challenge Richard gave to me and my classmates during a talk, and I was ready to show off more of my programming skills. But that was overly optimistic; in reality I ended up asking my neighbor Augustin for help every five minutes about Qt, the framework for the application we were making (which I had no experience with at all). Furthermore, I found out that the problems at work were much less straightforward than anything I had done at school or on my own, for example requiring some decisions based on what a user would want or on the general purpose of the application.

As time went on however, I slowly became more independent without even realizing it. Rather than immediately turn to my coworkers for help, I had enough basic knowledge that Qt's documentation or Stack overflow could help. By mid-July, I could just look at one of the issues on Github, have a quick discussion about what that would entail in terms of features, and implement it mostly on my own. Looking back, it's pretty incredible to me how much I learned about C++ and Qt, as well as concepts such as Remote Protocol Calls, all of which I had relatively little experience with.

Besides being able to learn a ton, one of the best parts of interning at SCS was that I working on stuff that actually mattered. Richard loved to tell a story about how he met another executive (from Mack Trucks I believe) whose interns were assigned some ridiculous project about reorganizing the company. All three times he told this story to me, it ended in the same way: he would say "Guess where that went?" and then point to the nearest trash can. Richard wasn't wrong though, the product I helped create this summer, Scoop 7, turned out to be pretty important. During one meeting we were asked to demo the our project to Presteligence and some company in Sweden (though credit goes to completely to Augustin for doing that). And as my internship was winding down, I overheard somewhere that our current Scoop 5 customers had been notified of Scoop 7's development.

Although the beginning was a little rough, all in all, my time at SCS was enjoyable and I'm certain that the experience I gained will be helpful to me in the future.

Daniel Qian
Johns Hopkins University
Computer Science Student
Summer 2017 Internship


Augustin Cavalier (2nd time as an SCS intern)

Well, Mr. Cichelli and co. liked me and my work enough that they invited me back, and this time, they came prepared with a substantial project: working on the Scoop publishware suite. SCS had bought the source code from the original developers and wanted to rehabilitate it, both to support their existing customers using it as well as making it a part of their joint venture with Presteligence and partnership with Mediabox.

Well, after a few days of attempting to swim through the code (but drowning instead) and consulting with the other SCS employees who had "worked" on the code but didn't know much more about it than I did, everyone agreed that a more-or-less complete rewrite was in order ... and so what was initially a "substantial" project was suddenly an "absolutely massive and possibly insane" project.

This summer, though, I wasn't alone in the madness, but was working on-and-off with some other SCS employees, and very closely with Daniel Qian, one of the other 2017 interns. What Daniel lacked in experience he more than made up for in enthusiasm, talent, and a willingness to learn, and so within a few weeks he was writing substantial portions with little help from me.

Between the two of us, we managed to construct the initial version of "Scoop 7", which was received with applause from Richard as well as SCS' partner organizations (and, eventually, the newspapers it was shown to as well.)

Thanks to Richard for trusting me with a major part of SCS' future, and for giving me the opportunity to try my hand at "medium-scale" project management. I think I've learned more this summer than last, even if not in a technical way.

Augustin Cavalier
Christendom College
Mathematics student
Summer 2017 Internship


Angela Vitaletti

After being at Northampton Community College for over a year, my adviser and computer science professor, Mr. Norman Lippincott, approached me after class one day with some very exciting news. He informed me that his friend and former boss, Richard Cichelli, gives students the opportunity to participate in internships at his company, Software Consulting Services. Mr. Lippincott asked if I would be interested in this, and I jumped at the chance. After an interview with Mr. Harwick, a short programming test, and meeting Mr. Cichelli, I was sitting behind my new desk at SCS.

I was very nervous to begin my work, but being friends with my mentor, Jacob, helped me adjust quickly. My first task was to make some minor modifications to one of SCS's software products, AdMAX. This required me to familiarize myself with SCS's own programming language. Eventually, I was able to do things such as create a dropdown menu and sort lists alphabetically. Within a few days, I had completed my first assignment and was given my next project.
When Jacob told me I would be joining him and a few of the other employees for a meeting, I assumed I was only there to listen. However, I quickly learned that this meeting was going to outline what I would be working on for the rest of the summer - to aid the development of a brand new software product for the company which would serve as a central information hub for various other SCS applications. This new software would be web-based and due to this fact, I was also required to learn several new languages I had never worked with before such as Javascript, jQuery, Python, HTML, and CSS. Being at Northampton, I only learned C++ and Assembly. Being web-based also allowed me to work with more graphical aspects, including Bootstrap.

Overall, my time at SCS was an amazing learning experience. I heavily doubted myself and my skills as a programmer in the beginning, but with the help of the wonderful people that work there, I was able to learn the languages I previously mentioned, as well as various other skills. I now feel more confident in my career pursuit of computer science. I feel as though my experience at SCS has given me a better understanding of how to program effectively by using different problem solving techniques and has taught me to more easily adapt to new situations, both with programming and real-life encounters. I am extremely proud of the work that I have done and I cannot wait to see what my future holds. Thank you to everyone at SCS for this fantastic opportunity! When I next return, I hope you have even more stories to share, Mr. Cichelli (Yes, I really did enjoy his stories).

Angela Vitaletti
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Computer Science Student
Summer 2016 Internship

Augustin Cavalier
In late 2015, at the beginning of winter break following the first semester of my freshman year at college, my parents said that I needed to have a "real" summer job, whether it be a software development internship, or "flipping burgers at McDonalds". Being a vegetarian and not particularly liking the smell of burgers, I polished up my resume and sent it to the four software companies I found within commuting distance of my house that offered internships.

SCS was the only one that replied at all, and they invited me to come in for an interview. Multiple pages of paperwork, notes, sample code, and one (decidedly interesting) interview with Mr. Cichelli later, I had an internship.

My initial mentor and supervisor, Jacob, gave me my first task: write an integration between SCS' up-and-coming enterprise service bus, and Google's "Doubleclick Ads for Publishers" system. The initial learning curve was *very* steep: while the language I was writing in (Python) I was mostly familiar with, I'd never worked with advertising systems nor enterprise service busses before, and so the terminology and APIs on both sides of the problem were totally unfamiliar to me, and the new material was overwhelming. But Jacob knew all the ins and outs of the enterprise service bus, and Google's documentation on DFP was explanatory enough, and so within two days I had a near-complete integration between the two systems finished.

Mr. Cichelli took this opportunity to paraphrase 'JAWS': "We're gonna need a bigger project." After a bit of doing various odd jobs, I took on a project that Dan and Mike had wanted to do for a while: re-do the entire front end to SCS' Community Advertising System to use modern web practices, as well as to make it work on mobile devices. I'd worked with web technologies in the past, although not on this scale, and I didn't know much at all about the internals of CAS. At the end of the summer, I had to give a brown-bag presentation on my work to the entire company, which was somewhat nerve-wracking but it was very well received. I learned a lot in doing that project, and through it got the opportunity to take a peek into how SCS engineers software to last not just years, but decades, as well as a chance to contribute my own ideas and abstractions to this longevity, even if I did annoy Mr. Cichelli a few times more than I should have with my (sometimes rather brash) ideas. Overall, I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot during my time at SCS, in both the technical and social aspects of the job.

Augustin Cavalier
Christendom College
Mathematics student
Summer 2016 Internship

Sean Clarke
In September, 2015 I got the opportunity to work for SCS as an accounts management intern until I went back to school in the spring.  This was a tremendous learning experience for me.  I was able to meet and sit down with a few of the more-than-welcoming staff members and hear how each played their part in helping the company succeed.  After that I was given my battle station (my desk) where I learned more about the sales process than I had ever expected from any internship, from cold calls and demos to helping with proposals.

During my time with SCS I was given the chance to do amazing things such as sit in on a high level executive sales meeting with a newspaper group in New Jersey, as well as help with the RFP for the White House Historical Association and even get to travel there afterward!  Overall this internship was a fantastic learning experience that I will never forget moving forward.  It would never have been possible without the supportive learning environment that the whole staff contributed to.

I have been given the opportunity to go back this summer as well and I can’t wait!

Here is a story about one of Sean's projects helping to sell the FotoWare digital asset system to The White House Historical Association.
Visit the resulting digital library.


Jacob S. Butts
Norman Lippincott is a professor at the Northampton Community College (NCC). I have had him for all four of the core classes required for a Computer Science Associate's Degree at NCC. Following the final course I received an email from him regarding his former place of employment, Software Consulting Services (SCS), seeking new interns and asking him for any recommendations. I was one of the candidates and jumped at the opportunity. I followed the instructions in his email and emailed the president of the company, Richard Cichelli, with my resume and an introductory email. After the interview and proficiency test I had gotten myself the position as a software development intern.

My first week I met most of the other staff and got my own desk in the same cubicle space as the other developer's, Dan and Michael, who would be helping me get started on learning to write software for SCS's Community Advertising Services (CAS). SCS has been in the newspaper business for more than twenty years, developing software for newspapers that assists with things such as the building and management of advertisements, editorials, classified, newspaper layouts, and many more components used within the newspaper business.

My first task was to improve the software that helped manage advertisements in papers. I was to create a file navigation window for the listing of files related to a single ad. Before I could do that however I would need to know what tools I could use. I spent the first couple days simply reviewing the language developed specifically for the SCS newspaper systems called Spice which has a couple different variants and is used in nearly all of the software at SCS. I also had to learn many other languages I was not as familiar with along the way like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Shell Script, Lout, Python, and possibly a few others. This was always a constant challenge during the internship, having to learn new languages, analyze preexisting and often complicated code in this new language to learn how it works and how I could utilize it.

So once I was prepared and ready to tackle the projects set before me I began to start modifying and adding code to create something new within the software. I spent my first month working on the mini goals presented to me, completing them and moving on to the next item until by the end of the month I had finished the list of goals with even a little time to spare before the loose deadline. I improved the advertisement information screen by adding the file browser, zooming capabilities, download options, multiple styling adjustments to make it look smooth, and added the ability to preview HTML files as well which was also used later to preview more complicated document formats (like .doc, .docx, .odt, etc.). I also updated other components like the advertisement email dialog with a rich text editor and more customization for the user and the advertisement file list with a quick filter drop down menu for easy downloading. I even began work at the end of my internship on a new project called the SCS PageTracker.

After all the projects I worked on at SCS and all the real world experience I have garnered I would definitely say that I could not have asked for a better opportunity to begin in the computer software development field than at Software Consulting Services. I unquestionably feel that I owe much to my professor, Norman Lippincott, for selecting me for the chance at such a great experience and I owe just as much to the SCS president, Richard Cichelli, for believing in my potential as a good intern and developer, for presenting me the chance to go from intern to employee, and for all the insightful stories of his full of history and humor. My internship at Software Consulting Services was an experience well worth the time, to be sure.

Jacob S. Butts
Northampton Community College
Computer Science & Mathematics Student
Summer 2015 Internship


Zhiyuan Cui
Working at SCS during the summer is really an awesome experience. I have worked with the CAS team to build a web-based markup tool for news editors. The most exciting thing is to find out my work could solve a true industry problem. It makes me feel like my work is useful and worth doing.

The most important thing I learned from being an intern is working as a team. I can’t finish my project without Mike, Dan and Charles’s help. We worked like a team. We worked together and shared ideas with each other. They are really experienced developers, I learned a lot from them.

As SCS is not a very big company, I not only worked with developers but also met with sales people. I can’t create a good product without understanding what the customer wants. I found out that developers and sales people have different ideas about the products. Talking with different guys, made me understand my product better because they provided different angles of the product.

I enjoyed working at SCS and will remember every day I spent here.

Zhiyuan Cui
Lehigh University
Computer Science and Engineering
Graduate Student
2014 internship


Todd Suess
The Winter Internship at SCS was a very rewarding and exciting experience. One of my biggest satisfactions as a programmer / software developer is knowing that I'll be able to see my work somewhere and know that someone is getting some great use out of it. I could go on about how excited I was when I saw my optometrist's postcard that had an address label made by a program I wrote for him a couple years ago. I'm very thankful that you, Martha, and everyone at SCS have been so helpful. And while I'm going back for another semester, I look forward to the next opportunity I have to come back to SCS.

Todd Suess
Lehigh University
Graduate Student
2012 and 2013 internships


Matt Brophy
Working at SCS has been a truly rewarding experience that will remain with me for the rest of my career. I was amazed at how quickly I and the other interns were brought up to speed on our projects, and even more at how quickly we were given a chance to contribute to critical portions of the projects. The SCS in-house technologies (Spice Formula and Spice Patterns) and the "anything is possible" attitudes of the SCS employees combine to create an incredibly productive development environment in which problems are reduced to mere stepping stones towards solutions.

As a longer term intern, I really had the chance to submerge myself completely in the project, and contribute at even the deepest levels. I can't explain the feeling of satisfaction that you feel as an intern when you are able to see your software being demo'ed to potential customers, and experience their positive reactions.

Matt Brophy
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
2008 and 2009 internships

Jian Wang
I spent this summer in SCS as an intern in CAS team. The training in first week gave me some general idea of their programming language. LiangJie, another intern, and I developed the online reservation system with SCS own development tools and the whole process was indeed amazing to me. I was not very familiar with software development at the beginning yet I did finish the project in around two weeks, which gave me more confidence in future work. I would like to thank the CAS team here for their time and effort. During the development of this reservation system, I also learned quite a lot about the newspaper advertisement industry.

Then we spent almost one month in our own FinalWords project. We only had a rough idea of what we wanted to implement. Richard and the CAS team helped us to analyze the whole project and figure out the steps to complete. We did some research on the current newspaper obituary market and decided to integrate our project into CAS's current system. Thus we can take advantage of their existing classified advertisement system and the project would be much easier to finish. Besides, our project could also be used by SCS own system to implement some additional features. Thank Richard for letting us do this project in SCS.

Last but not least, the "Agile development with Scrum," which is used in CAS team, also impressed me quite a lot. We have team meetings at least every two weeks to discuss about everyone's progress and plan the next sprint. This helped keep the whole team in the same track and let everyone choose the task he prefers. The customer could also be aware of the project's progress in the whole process. It's indeed a win-win situation. Apart from that, the frequent brown-bags also help everyone in the company to know about other team's work.

This summer is quite educational to me and I enjoyed working in SCS in this summer.

Jian Wang
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
Summer 2008 internships


LiangJie Hong
Today, I finished my last day in Software Consulting Services, LLC. as a summer intern. Two months period gave me an unforgettable experience that not only I learned a lot about software development skills and methods but also I worked happily in a family-like company.

The unique experience for me started from the time when I first sat down in front of the computer and began to write my first piece of program here in SCS, a totally new world came to me, even for a person who started programming at early ages in the primary school. Not every IT company has a full chain of development tools. You can mention Sun, Microsoft and IBM, who are industry giants. But for a small software company which only has around 50 people, it's amazing and definitely a challenge. Here in SCS, they have their own compilers, virtual machines, database tools, web frameworks, version control tools and even mail systems, which shocked me a lot when I heard of this. I learned a lot of these tools with a great help from my team peers. Although I can't use most of them out of the company, the process of learning is still valuable for me especially for a student never worked off campus before. This is definitely special experience you can't find in most of small software companies.

I will remember the days I spent here as an intern and those interesting stories Richard told to me.

LiangJie Hong
Lehigh University
Graduate student
Computer Science major
Summer 2008 internships


Ivan Stoev
As a co-op at SCS, I actively participate in the development of Layout-8000, an automated ad dummying system. Even though I was not very familiar with the newspaper production process when I started, SCS provided me with appropriate training to learn what I needed to know. The training also helped me easily adapt to their proprietary programming language and development tools.

Tasks vary from coding simple visual enhancements to implementing core program functionalities. This has helped me greatly improve my programming skills. Layout-8000 is a complex project, and working as part of a larger team is an educational experience in itself. It is quite a satisfaction to look at the product log and look at the tasks that our team has completed [Agile development with Scrum].

What I like most about SCS is the software development methodology our team uses. Through several short development cycles, we are able to accomplish more in a shorter period of time. With this decentralized approach, I am also able to pick tasks that interest me. The daily meeting are there to make sure everyone is on the same page and all the impediments are cleared out. I continuously get feedback and support from my counterparts and superiors. I've also had the chance to visit one of the sites that SCS works with. Meetings with customers occur regularly and our team presents our progress.

I'm glad I got an opportunity to complete my co-op at SCS, because it is a company that appreciates the work that interns/co-ops do. My experience at SCS will also affect my career plans in a positive way, because it helped me realize that I enjoy working as a software developer.

Ivan Stoev
Lehigh University
Class of 2009
Computer Science major
Fall 2007 and Summer 2008 internships


Kyle Kotch
This summer marks my second full year at SCS and my third summer as a full-time intern. Over the course of my career at SCS I have been involved in various product lines and projects. My current project is SCS dReason, our Business Intelligence product based on the open source Pentaho Project. This has been, personally, the most rewarding project that I have had the pleasure of working on. When I returned from a semester in Australia I was immediately pulled to rapidly develop 35 reports in this system for one of our customers in less than 30 days. So the pressure was on to learn this system and create a stable and fairly robust reporting engine out of it based on AdMAX data.
Keith quickly got me up to speed and we managed to deliver these reports on time, accurately, and in a foreign language. These reports only scratched the surface of our capabilities with this system. Soon, we were developing faster PostgreSQL databases, Mondrian schemas, and Pentaho reports. Through small tweaks in the way we designed our queries we were able to get considerable improvement.

Keith and I continued development to create dashboards and expand our analysis to support ad production data from SCS/Track. With this full-fledged business intelligence platform, we began doing demos for other customers and have made some sales. The fact that a large portion of the code behind this project is mine brings me great pride and joy. I can now see my work being used in production on a daily basis to effectively monitor sales and production data.
All of my experiences at SCS have helped me learn new things and become a better software developer. This project, in particular, has taught me many things ranging from Scrum project management to PostgreSQL databases that are helping me in the classroom this semester as well as in my future career, wherever that may be. I have had, and continue to have, a great time working and learning at SCS and am grateful for all the opportunities they have given me.

Summer 2008 internship
During the summer of 2006 I was employed by Software Consulting Services. This proved to be an invaluable experience for me and greatly enhanced my software engineering skills. My major is Computer Science, so the ability to work in the software development industry was a great experience, especially since I was just finishing my freshman year of college. Throughout the summer I participated in meetings to discuss upgrades and future development of their products. I worked side by side with current application developers to complete customer requested enhancements, support, and general maintenance. Not only did I learn valuable programming skills, such as BASH shell scripting and Linux system structure, but I also learned how to better work in a development team. I also learned how to make software from a customer/user perspective instead of from a IT/technician perspective. This allows me to create software that a user will like to use and want to use, instead of have to use.
Currently, some of my software is being used in the field at customer locations and the remaining software is being integrated into future releases. This internship offered me the rare opportunity to see real customers using my software and to get feedback from them. Often interns never see their software being used by customers. Watching your product be released is an experience that most people don't experience until they have graduated college and are working full time, but I got to experience that in the summer after my freshman year. This company allowed me more flexibility and let my programming affect their products more than I ever imagined. I have also met some amazing people here that truly care about what the interns do and make sure that they learn and have a positive impact on the company. Through this internship I have made many contacts that will help me in the future when I look for permanent employment after graduation.

Kyle Kotch
Lafayette College
Class of 2009
Computer Science major
Summer 2006 intern


Scott Weaver
When I started my summer at SCS, I came in knowing nothing about newspaper presses and never having written software professionally. In my first week, I learned a whole new programming language with the help of SCS employees and fellow interns who had been around for longer. I was then faced with the daunting task of learning a whole program, WebPresser, and improving upon its user interface. At first, this seemed impossible to me since I didn't know the first thing about presses, but throughout the summer, I made more and more progress until the project seemed within my grasp. By the end of the summer, I not only dramatically improved the user interface, but I also learned many valuable things about both the newspaper and software industry My summer at SCS was both educational and at times entertaining, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Scott Weaver
Moravian College
Class of 2008
Computer Science major
Summer 2007 internship


Joyce Pan
My experience at SCS can only be summed up by one word: extraordinary. At SCS, interns are not asked to do menial tasks, but are assigned real tasks, projects and applications that will be sold and promoted to customers. It gives you a sense of accomplishment knowing that the company cares and values you more than just an intern.
Joyce is from Taiwan. She is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and helped with SCS's Chinese newspaper customers.

Joyce Pan
Lehigh University
Class of 2010
Computer Science and Business major
Summer 2007 internship


Chris Hausman
I had the opportunity to intern with SCS for two summers where I worked on a wide variety of projects. Some were quick code fixes and others were multiple month projects where I started from scratch. For some of these projects I was on my own, free to determine how to achieve certain tasks and the best way to meet our end goals. On others I worked closely with one of the development teams, sometimes to locate and fix a bug, other times to determine how to implement a new feature. I cannot imagine a better company to have gotten my first real world working experience with than SCS. It was a great place for me to intern because they gave me work that mattered. Throughout all of my projects, it always felt like I was contributing something to the company, and that is a great feeling to have during your first internship.

Chris Hausman
Penn State University
Class of 2007
Computer Science major
Summer 2006 intern