State Farm
In the summer of 2022, I had the incredible opportunity to join Team Carbon at State Farm. My main project was to improve the UI preferences within State Farm's Claims Hub.
Before stepping into this role, Angular was a mystery to me, and navigating its files felt like solving a massive puzzle. Thankfully, my amazing mentor, Matt, helped me connect the dots and turn my confusion into confidence.
Role
Duration
June 2022 - December 2022
Team
Carbon
Tools
Angular
GitLab
Visual Studio Code
The Challenge
Simplifying Preferences for Everyone
State Farm introduced a game-changing feature that allows customers to easily choose six email and text preferences all at once. To bring this vision to life, we needed to revamp the Preferences UI in Claims Hub so users could seamlessly opt into all service notifications.
Discovery
From angular newbie to problem solver 😎
Before jumping into code, my mentor and I mapped out the key tasks for the project. I began with Angular tutorials, learning how CSS, HTML, TypeScript, and JavaScript worked together to achieve our goals. Once I felt ready, I dove headfirst into the project.
Before vs. After: UI Glow-Up ✨
Using Visual Studio Code, I experimented with CSS styling and adjusted HTML text. Because I haven't used TypeScript before I went through a steep learning curve—but I tackled it one step at a time.
The updated Preferences UI made it easier than ever for users to enroll, aligning perfectly with the business goal of increasing digital preference adoption.
Speech Competition 🎤
Each summer, State Farm hosts a speech competition, and this year's theme was:
"How will autonomous vehicles change the insurance landscape, and how can State Farm adjust?"
Public speaking wasn’t my strong suit, but I decided to challenge myself. Alongside my teammates Harshsai and Venusly, we dug into research. At first, making our presentation creative felt like an uphill battle, but advice from our speech advisor sparked an idea: I created Alex, a character who brought our slides to life. Crafting Alex’s illustrations was exhausting but so rewarding—it set our presentation apart and made the experience unforgettable.
Video Competition
While juggling the speech competition, I also participated in a video contest. The challenge was to create two engaging 20-second videos:
1️⃣ Funniest Internship Moment
2️⃣ Favorite Surprise Moment
I tapped into my animation skills with Procreate to create short, vibrant animations that showcased my State Farm journey. It was a blast flexing my creative muscles!
Other Tech Adventures
After wrapping up the competitions and UI preferences updates, I tackled smaller tasks for Team Carbon. I worked with tools like APIs, Postman, and Docker, learning to debug and problem-solve effectively.
🚨 Notable win: I added an error modal to handle issues during the claims redirect from State Farm to Hagerty.
Takeaways🎓
💡 Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
This internship pushed me to embrace the unknown. Whether it was diving into Angular, public speaking, or asking questions, I learned that stepping beyond my comfort zone leads to growth.
💻 Technology Will Always Teach You Something New
Back-end work introduced me to complex but fascinating concepts. My curiosity deepened with every new story I worked on, and I gained a newfound respect for the intricacies of backend development.