I love me some interns!!

Spring is my favorite time of year for lots of reasons. The warm weather signals the start of wakeboard season, visits to the great outdoor eateries in Fredericksburg, and best of all.... Interns! We have had great success, at IST Research, with our intern program. Every single year, since inception, we have kept an intern on as a full time employee and they are making a mark on everything we do.

We don't normally make our interns vacuum the pool table, that is unless you happen to drop a bag of powdered sugar on said pool table at the retreat facility during the Great Dessert Cookoff of 2017. Normally we see Joe Goulet building our Canary system which regularly injects messages throughout the dozens of social chat platforms we monitor to help identify outages and give us a real-time look at the health of our Pulse Platform. Joe joined us as an intern through University of Mary Washington here in Fredericksburg. In addition to being local to our offices he was also a fellow Marine Corps Veteran with armor experience and who doesn't need more of that around. Immediately after graduation, Joe accepted a full time position as a software engineer and has been kicking butt and vacuuming pool tables ever since.

Sometimes interns skip that whole intern step. Danielle Smalls found us at the career fair at the greatest school on the planet, Virginia Tech. Her combination of experience in the world of countering human trafficking (VT chapter president of the International Justice Mission (jan 2013-may 2014)), statistics, coding made her a perfect fit for IST Research and we just skipped internship and hired her full time right out of the intern fair. Danielle has made a huge impact here at IST Research, her people skills are ridiculous, so we have her on the front lines of our customer engagement front, helping make difficult information science problems seem easy! Danielle is one of the most sought out employees by the larger IST Research team. Her can do attitude, multifaceted skill set, insane people skills, and vigor make her a hot commodity here. We just finished an exercise as a leadership team and when we totaled up all of the request for her time it equated to 140% of her time. Take a number!

Dr. Sam Blazek holds the honor as the intern who stayed an intern longer than any other intern in the history of interns, I think. Sam was pursuing his Master's degree when I first met him in the summer of 2014. I tried, over, and over, and over to convince him to hang up his advanced studies and join us full time... three years later, with PhD in hand... he finally took me up on the offer. Sam is one of the most critical thinkers we have on the team and leads our team in experimental design, the application of our platform to novel problems (uncovering hidden populations), statistically relevant sampling in parts of the world with no census, and other exciting topics. I am really glad Sam didn't get tired of interning for us. Sam likes to dance!

Sometimes your interns grow up and leave home for bigger and better opportunities. That is the story behind Artem Klintsevich. Artem's first encounter with the company was at our very first company retreat ever. He showed up at Lake Anna to hang out with us for the day. He was even willing to jump behind the boat and give water skiing a try. It was just a try... and after about an hour I finally made him get back in the boat. Artem interned for us the summer before his last semester of school and immediately took a position with us after graduating. His work included solving all kinds of interesting problem and he was part of our team that worked to revamp the Innocence Lost Database adding to the IST portfolio of impacting Human Security. Artem voluntarily demoted himself back to intern and went back to school to get his advanced degree. While he has moved on to bigger and better things, Artem went from a blossoming new graduate to a full stack and trusted engineer when he left the nest after 3 years at IST.

The main picture for this post is one of my favorite people on the planet, with whom I share an incredible library of great stories, funny moments, and adventure around the world. Abdullah Rahmanyar joined IST Research in our second year of the internship program. He was attracted to our work in Afghanistan, home to much of his extended family. Abdullah's internship was novel as we were actually able to send him to Afghanistan during his internship to execute a project we were conducting at the end of that summer. He integrated several open source software components, equipped a number of Afghan university professors with a new tool and helped them collect information about their communities. He was a little bit late returning to school for his final semester that fall but his professors knew that the experience he gained on that project was far more important than anything they had for him in the classroom. Immediately upon graduation, Abdullah began his career here at IST Research. He remains the most prolific traveler in all of the company having visited more than a dozen countries deploying our technology in some of the most difficult and disconnected places on the planet.

And finally is the first. Madison Bahmer was the very first intern we ever hired, in 2012. Then we fired him because we ran out of money for the intern program midsummer... Then we hired him for his first job out of that other school in Virginia... Then we fired him because we completely ran out of money all together... Then we gave him a consulting agreement... Then funding came through and we hired him again... Madison brings an extra special light to any room he enters, he quickly became recognized as something out of the ordinary by other engineers in the company. He quickly began impacting the direction of all of our engineering and technical pursuits. He took my abstract concept behind Pulse and turned it into a reality. He provides me technical guidance, ideation, and vision. When appropriate he pushes back strongly on ideas of mine that conflict with his vision for the technical path he has laid out (this usually happens weekly). I have had the pleasure of bringing into my executive leadership team, placing him as the Chief Technology Officer and an owner of the company. I am happy to count him as a friend and colleague in business and life. Yeah... He is a rockstar in my book.

We love interns at IST Research, we take them seriously, they end up leading in our company, and they impact their world. And we are looking for more! Find us, tell us what you are passionate about.