My name is Linde Nouwen and I am an Electrical Engineering Student in my final year at KU Leuven. Over the course of summer 2021, I undertook an internship with the Apps v4 team at Twipe.
Some of my friends, who had done an internship elsewhere, said that internships are often just side projects which are sometimes not even used by the company afterwards. Therefore, when I was looking for an internship, it was important to me that this was not case and that I could be an actual part of the team. At Twipe, I found exactly that.
In the Appsv4 team, I worked on the next generation of apps for the different clients of Twipe. Before my internship, I had no experience in front-end development, but thanks to the great team that helped and supported me, I managed to learn a great deal.
Twipe has a great working environment. Everybody is very approachable, which makes it easier to ask questions. I think this has to do with two of their company values: integrity and teamwork. The fact that everybody is so straightforward with each other makes for an open environment and a great atmosphere.
My first task involved helping to turn the apps into a generic basis, while still allowing each client to have its own theme, to give each app a different look and feel. With each new task I got, I got a little more responsibility and dove deeper into the code. This made it easy to learn the programming language and get familiar with the project. In the end, I managed to write an algorithm to adapt the size of the publication card depending on the size and orientation of the device that is used.
Twipe might have taken a risk by asking an intern who had never written code in React Native, but because they trusted me to be able to do this, I was actually highly motivated to get it done. Aside from that, I also had to help the team in testing the code, which meant I was included in a lot of different parts of the product chain. Thanks to the way Twipe handled my internship, I was able to get a lot from this experience.
The company also took a real interest in its interns. For starters, the CEO took the time to have a lunch with all the interns, to get to know each one of us. Even though I was only there for six weeks, this really made me feel like I was part of the company. I also got this feeling after being included in other company activities like the pizza and games night and after-work drinks. Furthermore, Twipe made an effort to look into my interests. My option within Electrical Engineering is ICT security and networks and I do some ethical hacking in my free time. To address my interest in cybersecurity, I was able to do a small security assessment of their apps during my last week at Twipe.
After six weeks at Twipe, it is clear to me that this is a great company to work for, where many opportunities are given to learn and to grow. The company really pushes itself and their employees to move forward in a positive and encouraging way. I found the work I did here very meaningful and the work that Twipe does is very important for the future of journalism. If you want to make a difference to the future of journalism and have the chance to undertake an internship like no other, take a look at our summer internship programme.
Interested to join? Together we can shape the future of news and revolutionise the way people consume content. Join Twipe today and be part of the journey towards making a lasting impact on the news media landscape!