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During the summer of 2022, I had the opportunity to work with Team Carbon at State Farm. My main focus was on the UI preferences within State Farm's Claims Hub.
Before joining the team, I wasn't familiar with Angular and had never worked with various files. Navigating through these files felt overwhelming at first. But, thanks to my fantastic mentor, Matt, things began to click into place.
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State Farm has introduced a convenient feature that lets customers easily choose six of their email and text preferences all at once. To make this happen, Claims Hub will need to update the Preferences UI to allow users to opt in to all service notifications.
Before I started coding, my mentor and I sorted out the various tasks we needed to tackle. I took some time to go through Angular tutorials to understand how CSS, HTML, TypeScript, and JavaScript collaborate to achieve specific goals. Once I felt comfortable with the framework, I dived into working on my project.
I used Visual Studio Code to experiment with CSS styling. Modifying text in HTML was straightforward, but I found working with TypeScript a bit challenging to grasp at first.
These improvements make enrolling simpler for users and help achieve the business goal of increasing enrollment in digital preferences.
Here are several changes I made to the preferences page:
State Farm holds a speech competition every summer. This year's theme was "How will autonomous vehicles change the insurance landscape, and how can State Farm adjust?" Initially, I was hesitant due to my discomfort with public speaking. However, I recognized the chance to step beyond my comfort zone.
Teaming up with Harshsai and Venusly, we took on the challenge. Before researching this topic, I didn't know anything about autonomous cars. As I learned more about these cars, I became really fascinated by them.
Even though we had solid research, we struggled with making our presentation creative. I spent a lot of time brainstorming, but I couldn't find a solution. Eventually, our team sought guidance from our speech advisor, who provided useful advice for adding creativity. That's when I came up with the idea of creating a character named Alex to include in our slides. While making the illustrations was a bit tiring, it turned out to be really valuable in making our group stand out.
While involved in the speech competition, I also took part in another contest. This one involved creating a video, no longer than 20 seconds, to share my State Farm journey. My first video was about my funniest internship experience, and my second was my favorite surprise moment. I made these short animations in Procreate, and I enjoyed using my animation skills!
After finishing my competitions and UI preferences tasks, I focused on smaller stories for Carbon, which included working with APIs, Postman, Docker, and various other tools. One notable achievement was adding an error modal for cases where an error occurs during the claims redirect from State Farm to Hagerty.
Step outside of your comfort zone:
My experience at State Farm has been a journey of personal growth. I've stepped beyond my familiar boundaries thanks to the opportunities they provided, even if they initially made me uneasy. Before this internship, I hesitated to ask too many questions, thinking it'd be a bother. However, I realized that seeking help was crucial for my learning, and I gradually became comfortable with asking simple questions.
Technology will always teach me something new:
This internship has exposed me to the true complexity of backend work. I learned so many new concepts I've never heard before and I was constantly fascinated with each new story. I grew a deep appreciation for back-end work while working with an amazing team.
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