Intern Testimonials

Hear straight from the interns themselves on what an internship at SCS is really like!

2020 Winter Interns

Bela Madrigal (2019 & 2020 Intern)
Lehigh University
Computer Science and Communications
*Marketing Intern*

As I enter my last semester of college, I’m beginning to reflect on all of the amazing opportunities I’ve had as an undergraduate at Lehigh. One of the highlights of my undergrad experience has been spending my final summer and winter breaks interning for a company like SCS, where the work is important and the learning is continuous. There was never a day I didn’t learn something new, whether it was a marketing strategy, design concepts, random tidbits about outer space, or even a new poker term, SCS kept me engaged and excited. Even when I came back for my second internship, I was still learning not only about the company but about my own capabilities as well. I’ve been pushed out of my comfort zone to find new and exciting ways to build upon the knowledge I already have, and I have already seen how working at SCS has prepared me for graduation and beyond. I am so grateful to Martha, Richard, and the whole SCS crew for welcoming me and investing in my growth over the past few months. I could not have asked for a better group of people to spend my time with, and I am looking forward to everything that the future has in store for me!

2019 Summer Interns

Ethan Hartley
Northampton Community College
Computer Science
*Now a full-time SCS employee*

While I have always enjoyed problem solving, I wasn't able to dive into programming until college. Earlier, in high school, the closest I could get was math courses. Past high school, when I got to college, I was finally able to take computer science courses. Later, when I graduated with an Associate Degree from Northampton Community College in May of 2019, I decided it was time to look for a programming job and escape my current position at customer service for Giant. After searching for a bit, I discovered SCS, sent in my resume, and waited. Yearning for a response, it wasn't too long until I heard back from SCS, inviting me to an interview. Previously, I had only had one interview, so I was quite nervous, and a few weeks later, I unfortunately got a call explaining that they had filled their full time positions; however, they offered me one of their summer internships. Of course, I gladly accepted. Knowing it was my first day, I didn't expect much, but after a short meeting regarding onboarding paperwork, I sat at my desk and started on a set of introductory programs. Encouraging me along the way was Nick, a recently-hired full time developer, I was able to work through these programs and learn the in house programming language for SCS. Racing along, I was finished with the programs on day three and started reading up on the documentation. Day four: I wanted to actually get my hands on some more code, so I went to ask what I should do next. Unfortunately, nobody was there, so I went to see what Nick was working on. Rather than send me away, he was kind enough to explain what he was working on: a customer had discovered a bug caused by a global variable. I sat down with him, and we went through the code looking for all the instances we would need to fix. Not expecting it, I got called into Mr. Cichelli's office around day five. Getting a bit nervous, I sat down and he mentioned he was about to take a risk and my internship may be coming to a close...

Letting a few moments pass, he continued by saying the other employees seemed to like me. Unbeknown to me, he was about to offer me a full time position at SCS. Not wanting to rush into it, I decided to look over the offer and paperwork at home. Confident I would enjoy it at SCS, I signed the letter and returned it to Mr. Cichelli a few days later, accepting the full time position. Hard at work, I have been learning more and more about SCS and programming. Squishing the first bug with Nick was the start, and we continued working together on other small projects for few weeks. Once we got a feel for what we were doing, we were assigned our own projects. Rewardingly, all of these projects directly affected the customers of SCS, which is a rewarding feeling. Recently, one of the newer customers of SCS needed to import all previous ads into our online tracking program. Yielding the new program allowed me to not only learn more about the in house programming language, but I got to learn about another language, XSLT, which would be used to convert XML files into our in house format.

Despite being at SCS for only a few months, I have learned a lot about programming. Also, I have been exposed to a variety of programming languages, which keeps every day at work interesting. Naturally, I enjoy knowing that rather than menial tasks, I have been working on programs that directly impact our customers since day one (technically four)... Lately, I have really enjoyed working at SCS, and I really enjoy the environment of the office. Overall, everyone is kind, knowledgeable, and always ready to help, and that's just during working hours. Lunch time is when the real fun starts... (Get an internship, or read the first letter of each sentence to ruin the surprise.)

Drew Verenna
Muhlenberg College
Computer Science

During my sophomore year, one of my computer science professors had mentioned that I should apply for a summer internship. After searching on a variety of websites for internships, I found SCS, decided to apply, and about a week and a half later I received an email about an interview. I interviewed with one of the developers, Dan, who asked me a variety of questions before having me complete a small program. After completing the program I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Cichelli.  He asked me a variety of questions about Computer Science before offering me the position. Shortly after my interview, I found out that Mr. Cichelli had contacted my professor and asked him to let any of my classmates that would be interested in the internship. I then found out shortly after that a classmate of mine, Erich, had also applied for and subsequently been offered a position at SCS.


Near the end of May, Erich and I started working together at SCS on WebEdit, a web version of the Scoop7 product. Although neither of us had prior experience with web development, we were excited that we would be able to learn something new that we may not have had the chance to otherwise. Throughout the weeks Erich and I worked on WebEdit we learned about a variety of tools that we would need to use to complete this project, such as Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS. While we unfortunately did not get to finish the project by the time our internships ended, we did get far more done than we initially expected and I am proud of the parts of the website that we did complete.

Overall, I think that my internship at SCS was a very valuable experience. It helped expand my knowledge of programming, gave me an opportunity to work on software that will actually be used, and allowed me to work with a variety of friendly, welcoming, and knowledgeable people. I would very much recommend the internship program as a productive and worthwhile summer experience.

Erich Buerkert
Muhlenberg College
Computer Science

While on the hunt for an internship position for the summer of 2019, I was informed by a professor of mine that another student at Muhlenberg had received a position at SCS, and he encouraged me to apply to the small company out in Nazareth. Not having a position at the time, I decided to send in an application. I received a response within the week, and I came to SCS for a one-on-one interview with a current employee, Mike. Overall, the interview process was fairly straightforward. I was asked a variety of general questions relating to my academic background and knowledge of computer science, and at the end, I was given a small program to complete. I eventually received word that I had got the position, and I began working alongside a fellow Mule, Drew, near the end of May. The main task we were given for the summer was to replicate the Scoop7 application, a product offered by SCS, as a web application. Knowing absolutely nothing about web development, I was excited to delve into something unfamiliar. As the weeks went by, I learned all about JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, web sockets, and various other tools that would be necessary for the completion of the project. Although we didn't finish the web app by the end of summer, we managed to complete a large portion, and I can definitely say that I am proud of our work. Enriching and challenging, my experience at SCS was valuable in understanding the duties and expectations of an employee of a successful company. Richard, Martha, and all the employees of SCS were very welcoming and supportive of us interns, and I would recommend the internship to anyone seeking a productive and fruitful summer experience.

Bela Madrigal
Lehigh University
Computer Science and Communications
*Marketing Intern*

Like every other junior in college who doesn’t have their life together, I waited until the very last minute to start looking for a summer internship. I filled out what seemed like a thousand applications, for a thousand different kinds of positions, and wasted my days staring at the phone, hoping that I would hear back from just one company. Weeks passed. Nothing. My friends and I were all in the same boat. Everyone was applying, but the lines were dead. It seemed like the only time we would hear back from potential employers was when they had to “regretfully inform” us that they had “moved forward with other candidates”- and that’s if they got back to us at all. By the time final exams rolled around I figured it was already too late to find a viable internship, and I had actually started to get used to the idea of sleeping my summer away- at least it would make up for all the sleep I’d lost my first three years of college (yeah, that’s definitely how that works). I wasn’t planning on applying anywhere else, but nothing inspires productive procrastination quite like the pressure of impending academic failure, so I decided instead of studying for my finals, I would apply to two more positions that my mom had texted me about- she was more desperate for me to get a job than I was and boy, did she make sure I knew it. Despite the constant texts with new job opportunities that I definitely didn’t feel like applying for, I knew that if I didn’t take my mom’s advice, I would have to figure out how to convincingly spin “Professional Netflixer” on my resume. Not the best look. So I applied and as it turns out, moms might actually know what they’re talking about (shhh! don’t tell anyone) because in a week’s time, both companies reached out for interviews and after another week I was sitting with two offers for two vastly different but equally exciting positions. 

If you had asked me during my internship search what kind of internship I wanted, I probably would’ve answered with “anything that pays.” But after coming in to SCS for an interview with Martha and Richard, I got a feeling that picking an internship was going to come down to much more than just money. I immediately felt welcome when I walked in at SCS, and I could see how excited they were to have me there. I knew I wouldn’t be just another face blending into the staff, but actually a part of the SCS team. The work I would be doing was right up my alley, from website design to writing articles and press releases to using my Spanish language skills to connect with clients in different countries. I knew I would find mentors at SCS that would be invested in my growth and make my experience exceptional. And of course, the biggest reason I was drawn to SCS was the opportunity to play poker at lunch every day and show the tough guys that this gal can and will steal all your money if given the chance (definitely the best part). So when I walked out of SCS after my interview, I knew those were all of the things that would eventually lead me to accept their offer, and I’m so glad I did. I got to do everything I wanted and more, while meeting awesome people along the way. I’m incredibly thankful to SCS for giving me the opportunity to get off my couch this summer and do some great work. 

So, moral of the story kids: don’t ignore your mom’s text messages- they might actually land you some pretty cool opportunities. 

2018 Summer Interns

Matt Gerber
Lafayette College
Computer Science & Asian Studies

In the spring of my Sophomore year at Lafayette College, my Career Advisor, who was helping me research summer internships at the time, pointed me in the direction of Software Consulting Services. After looking into the company and reading intern testimonials such as this on their website, I became quickly interested in working at SCS. Having studied computer science at Lafayette for two years, I had gained exposure to many computer languages. However, I was seeking something more, something in the real world. This is why working at SCS for the summer appealed to me so much.

After completing the interview process and speaking with Richard, I almost immediately heard back. Less than a week later, I began my internship. From the very beginning, I was thrown headfirst into challenging assignments that tested my previously attained, but still nascent, skills in C++ as well as Qt Creator that I had attained the semester previous in my Software Engineering class. This was both daunting and exciting, and I soon came to learn that working at SCS was exactly the kind of internship I was looking for.

Throughout the summer, I worked exclusively with the the small, tight-knit Scoop team (working on a newspaper editorial application). From my first week onward, I was completing small tasks designed to improve on, fix bugs in, or add new functionality to the Scoop7 software, mostly in relation to ScoopEdit. 

Such assignments included adding features to the find, replace, and highlight dialog within the editor window, improving article SaveAs functionality, and creating both a personal and shared corporate dictionary system that allowed users to save words in the editor they deemed should be ignored by the built-in spellchecker. Along with these tasks and others, I attended daily morning scrum meetings to discuss my work with my fellow Scoop teammates. Not only did this keep me on track with my work throughout the summer, but it also gave me further appreciation towards my contribution towards the software as a whole.

Overall, my time spent at SCS was one of the most informative and interesting experiences I have gained as a computer scientist thus far. It gave me insight into what it is like to work on a large-scale, group-dependent project as well as create software as requested by a base of consumers. I look forward to using these newly attained skills in my journey as a computer scientist.

2017 Summer Interns

Emily Ebling
Elizabethtown College
Computer Science

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.

Augustin Cavalier (2016 & 2017 Intern)
Christendom College
Mathematics
*Now a full-time SCS employee*

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.

Daniel Qian
Johns Hopkins University
Computer Science

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 was 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 a company in Sweden (though credit goes 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.

2016 Summer Interns

Angela Vitaletti
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Computer Science

Augustin Cavalier
Christendom College
Mathematics

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).

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.

2015 Summer Interns

Jacob S. Butts
Northampton Community College
Computer Science & Mathematics
*Now a full-time SCS employee*

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.

Sean Clarke
Northampton Community College
Computer Science

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.

2014 Summer Interns

Zhiyuan Cui
Lehigh University
Computer Science and Engineering
(Graduate Student)

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.

2013 Winter Interns

Todd Suess (2012 & 2013 Intern)
Lehigh University
(Graduate Student)

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.

2008 Summer Interns

LiangJie Hong
Lehigh University
Computer Science
(Graduate Student)

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.

Matt Brophy (2008 & 2009 Intern)
Lehigh University
Computer Science
(Graduate Student)

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.

Kyle Kotch (2006 & 2008 Internships)
Lafayette College
Computer Science

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.

Ivan Stoev (2007 Co-Op & 2008 Summer Internship)
Lehigh University
Computer Science

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.

Jian Wang
Lehigh University
Computer Science
(Graduate Student)

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.

2007 Summer Interns

Scott Weaver
Moravian College
Computer Science

Joyce Pan
Lehigh University
Computer Science and Business

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.

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.

2006 Summer Interns

Kyle Kotch
Lafayette College
Computer Science

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 AdReason, 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.

Chris Hausman
Penn State University
Computer Science

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.