Intern Upturn

Posted by Mark Brousseau

At a time when aspiring young professionals are having a hard time breaking into the corporate world, US Dataworks is arming high school and college students with invaluable programming and financial services knowledge, as well as industry contacts, through a hands-on internship program in its product development group. Recent “graduates” of the program have gone on to attend the University of Texas at Austin and Louisiana State University. On top of gaining real-world experience, interns can tell prospective employers that they’ve interned for a company recognized as an innovator in its industry.

US Dataworks is a Houston-based provider of payments processing solutions and services. The company’s Clearingworks platform is the industry’s only deployed solution for the end-to-end processing of any paper-based or electronic payment. Each summer, the company selects students to work on critical projects alongside seasoned programmers in its product development group.

US Dataworks launched its internship program in 2009. That summer, students worked on coding automated test cases for the company’s Clearingworks platform. Written in the Java development framework, the students’ test cases are still used by US Dataworks’ development team to automate quality assurance tasks; the test cases have greatly reduced the burden on the company’s full-time quality assurance staff and have helped to ensure better product releases for US Dataworks customers.

This past summer, the company’s interns used the Java development framework to successfully create an entire set of reports on search results. The reports, which conformed to coding and design standards, included imbedded links, and were especially designed with the user experience in mind.

“US Dataworks takes great pride in its reputation as an innovator in the payments industry,” said Leilani Doyle (ldoyle@usdataworks.com), US Dataworks (www.usdataworks.com) Director of Product Management. “Tapping into bright young minds provides our development team with a fresh perspective on programming solutions, as well as much needed resources as we extend our product lines.”

Not surprisingly, US Dataworks is committed to continuing its internship program.