Luna Chen is a web development intern pursing a Bachelor of Science degree in data science and mathematics at Northeastern University for next fall and is currently taking a gap year this year. Her gap year has proven to be very productive, using her time to work as a STEM intern at a philanthropic education research company, a product manager associate at an EdTech startup, organizing a hackathon (where web developers, graphic designers, and others in computer programming collaborate on software projects) and is a participant in Global Citizen Year Academy.
For the VA, Luna is developing a CoStrategy and is learning about search engine optimization that improves the DME Interns website by making the website’s search suggestion rank higher on search engines. Before entering the DME Internship, Luna said she did not know much about search engine optimization but has learned more about it through her time at the internship which has expanded her knowledge of web development in general.
Luna found the DME Internship while searching for it online during the application period in July and then found the web development internship with the Virtual Student Federal Student (VSFS) with the VA and applied for it.
Despite the pandemic changing her plans for enrolling in Northeastern this spring, Luna says taking a gap year has been very productive for her and also beneficial because she is in a learning program with Global Citizen Year Academy. She is taking two classes, learning leadership skills and meeting new people from all over the world. The DME Internship has also helped Luna make connections on LinkedIn and learn how to create a profile that landed her other internships.
For the future Luna is excited to participate with other web development interns on a priority project to help develop and design a new mobile app on the app store.