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How to Prepare for a Gravity Forms Internship

By Isabel Doran Published September 27, 2022

Landing an internship at a software or tech company can be a difficult task. But, ensuring that you’ve completed some additional training and learning experiences can help to set yourself up for success.

While starting a new job is exciting, it may also come with nerves. For example, what skills and experience will be beneficial during the position? I had these exact feelings when I started my process of getting an internship at Rocketgenius for Gravity Forms. Most jobs give an overview of what the position entails but rarely share the specifics of how one can acquire the necessary skills for the given role.

Throughout this article, I will walk you through the additional training I completed in addition to my educational background, which helped prepare me for a Quality Assurance Internship on the Product Development team here at Gravity Forms.

Hopefully, this information will be of help to many, and give clear insight into how to get started when preparing for an internship with a tech company like Gravity Forms.

Let’s jump in!

Early Education and Schooling

The timeline of education and experience described below is my own personal experience. While the ideas and topics covered are important, the timeline of which they are established does not have to match for everyone. It’s about the quality of the journey rather than the timeline.

High School Years & College Education

I am currently a senior studying Mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT. But, this has been a long time coming, as I struggled greatly with math during my middle school years. After months of at-home learning and practice using Khan Academy, I soon began mastering my problem-solving skills and grew a passion for learning and mathematics.

It was at this point that I learned about Codecademy. I didn’t know it then, but this was the start of my preparation for my Gravity Forms internship.

Codecademy.com – The following courses were great (free) introductions to learning different code-based languages. You will need to create a free account before starting any of the courses.

When first starting, I focused on the web/front-end tailored languages and completed the following courses*:

* I had completed these courses a few years back and the content may have been updated in that time.

College Courses – During my first year of college, I signed up for a couple of coding courses to help diversify my math-heavy curriculum. Similar to the courses provided on Codecademy, these courses were introductions to code-based languages. But, since they were at the college level, we did go a bit further with projects and programming examinations. My courses were:

CS 100 – Roadmap to Computing:

This introductory course taught the Python language, a few of the main topics are listed below:

Built-in and Sequence Data Types, Conditional Execution & Boolean Logic, Iterations, Data Files and Dictionaries, Designing & Using Classes, Debugging & Testing.

CS 113, Introduction to Computer Science

In this introductory course, we walked through the Java programming language. While some of the main ideas were overlapping, a few additional topics covered included:

Arrays and File I/O, Object-Oriented Programming, Recursion, and Exceptions.

Outside of the Classroom

As June of 2018 rolled around, I was stepping into my first summer as a college student. Usually, this is when students begin internships to help establish some work experience. I knew I would be traveling throughout this time visiting with family, so I needed to approach getting some work experience from a different angle.

I decided to follow along with the Stanford Course Developing iOS 11 Apps with Swift (additional notes for this course can be found on this GitHub Repo). Similarly, this content has aged a little as newer iOS versions have since become available, but the principles remain the same.

Once I completed this course, I was able to use the concepts and ideas displayed to develop my very own application. By October 2018, I published Knowledge of Nature on the App Store for iPhones and iPads. Knowledge of Nature is a physics calculator that will help solve any of the standard equations and formulas found throughout Mechanics, Electromagnetism, and bits of Modern Physics.

Going through this learning and creation process helped me establish a clearer understanding of the application/product development process.

Months Leading Up to

Once I knew that I wanted to apply for a Gravity Forms internship, I made sure to take a deep dive into the product itself. I did this by playing around on the Gravity Forms Demo Site and reading through the How to get started with Gravity Forms blog posts. I also wanted to freshen up some back-end and front-end programming skills specifically used for Gravity Forms and WordPress. To do this I looked to a few different online resources.

Using Online Resources

When looking online for courses related to Command Line Interface (CLI), Gravity Forms, and WordPress, I found myself using three different sites. Each of these sites highlights differing topics with ranging difficulties and can be worked through in any order.

LinkedIn Learning – The following courses were the bulk of my additional training for my Product Development Internship. To access these courses, you must first connect to a Linkedin account. For first-time users, they do offer a 1-Month Free Trial. For students, you can connect to LinkedIn Learning through your College/University email address. Connecting your email allows you to bypass the payment while your school email is active. The course list is as follows:

Frontend Masters – This is a paid platform, but similar to LinkedIn Learning, they offer a free option for students. In order to access their 6-month free trial, students must sign up for a GitHub Student Developer Pack, which includes additional perks such as Free access to GitHub Pro and supplementary partner programs. From there, connect your GitHub Student Developer account to Frontend Masters, and you have access for the next 6-months payment. The course I completed was:

Complete Intro to React V7, Brian Holt

Learn Enough Command Line to be Dangerous – This is a paid platform but runs about $5 in total. It is a shorter course but includes detailed walkthroughs and exercise problems to help provide hands-on training. Access the course material by clicking here.

Things to Keep in Mind

Now that we have gone through the laundry list of what I have done to get to this point: let’s take a breather! It is important to remember to be kind to yourself during the job hunting/learning process. Especially in the tech world, there will always be something new to learn and try out, so embracing that idea makes the process smoother.

Allow Time to Learn

Learning a programming language, development style, and coding interface is not a task that can be completed in a single night or one go around. If you want to ingrain these skills and ideas, you should set aside time daily/weekly to complete additional training and educational experiences.

Use All the Resources Available to You

As noted throughout this article, numerous free resources can take even novice coders deep into their understanding of front-end and back-end development. If you get stuck on a question, do not be afraid to throw it into a search engine and compare the results. Chances are there is someone else who has wondered the same thing and maybe already has sourced the answer.

Specifically, when trying to learn Gravity Forms, I have to recommend our User and Developer documentation guides. Before I was a Rocketgenius myself, these were my bread and butter in understanding how to use and evolve Gravity Forms.

Hopefully, now you have a better idea of some resources and tools which can help prepare you when applying for a tech internship. Following this article, I’ll share my experience with the Product Development and Marketing teams. These articles should help to provide additional insight into what I learned and helped develop during those internships.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with the Women in WP Podcasters. Here is a link, if you are interested in listening to our talk about WordPress and Transferable Skills.

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