A Memorable Internship
The six-week internship was a compulsory part of my curriculum at the Media and Cultural Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. I have studied computer science and was excited to work on CLIx with the research and technology teams. I expected to learn and experience new things and was not disappointed.
When I started,I received a brief orientation to CLIx and the status of research. I would go through the tools of the already completed Baseline and then work on Midline research as an analyst. For the first week and a half, I validated research tools and provided feedback, modified report documents in Corel Draw, did bug testing for games being developed and made models for the games using Photoshop and Google Drawing. I also learnt more about different CLIx teams by sitting in on many meetings.
The site of multiple brainstorms
By the end of the second week, I was working on a dashboard that would take data from four different data sources (Lab Readiness Tool, Platform data, IMT and the issue tracker) and show the progress of each school in a visual drilled-down form. Without going into the technical aspects of the project, I can say that we were basically going to create a new table for the finite number of user queries, and the table would be updated every 15 days as the parent databases are updated. This new table would send the CSV/JSON files from this new view upon user queries to the clix.tiss.edu WordPress website and the data would be visualized either with a plugin like D3 or Google Charts.
Mindmap for folder parsing, CSV selection code and Mindmap for the entire dashboard
I made some progress on this project and look forward to coming back to work on the myriad challenging projects at CLIx. It is extremely interesting to see how the attempt to connect learning and the practice in the field have one thing in common: passionate hard work and constant negotiation.
(Sayan Bhattacharjee, Intern, Technology and Research team, CLIx)
