Mykhailo Antoniv ’17 is making the most of his computer science major this summer in an internship with Grand Central Tech, a startup accelerator headquartered in New York City. Through his work with GCT, Antoniv is also acting as an intern at Backtrace, an error debugging platform for native applications. His endeavors this summer are supported by the Class of 2006 Fund, managed through Hamilton’s Career Center.
At both firms, Antoniv simultaneously works on a combination of Backtrace and GCT projects, offering him a broad-based professional experience exploring startup and tech-industry culture from many angles. His internship with Backtrace centers primarily around the company’s website, helping to ensure an accurate and effective representation of the program’s signature crash-analysis.
Antoniv’s responsibilities at GCT are numerous and diverse. First, throughout the program each intern is required to draft a blog post offering insight into their experience at GCT; Antoniv’s will be available August 6. Secondly, groups of interns are tasked with developing games as an extension of the program’s game-development introductory workshop through Microsoft. Finally, and most excitingly, groups of interns are being given a shot at creating their own startups, which will be presented to investment giant Goldman Sachs on August 13.
Antoniv’s group of four is developing a website/app aimed at helping teachers find workshops quickly and efficiently. “Teachers rely largely on googling and word of mouth in finding workshops,” he explained. “Our app aims to facilitate the process. Available workshops will be listed and displayed on a map, where they can be filtered by cost, location and subject, among other things.” The platform will also allow teachers to save workshops of interest, as well as recommend and discuss available offerings with others. After interviewing a variety of teachers, Antoniv’s group has now moved into the website-development stage of the project.
Primarily from his work with Backtrace, Antoniv has learned skills that he will be able to carry forward into his future studies and professional endeavors. In addition to coding languages such as React JS, Javascript, and Bootstrap, his projects in website-development have required that he gain a familiarity with major platforms like HTML, CSS, Ajax, and jQuery.
Beyond simply gaining technical skills, however, the dual internships have offered even greater rewards than anticipated, says Antoniv. “GCT offers an overwhelming number of people to meet, projects to work on, and skills to learn… (and) at Backtrace I get to work with top-notch software engineers, many of whom have worked for companies like AppNexus and IBM.” He concluded, saying “I came here in the hopes of gaining some valuable coding experience, but I’m clearly getting far more.”
