For the month of August, we will be sharing a weekly post about our interns, their insights into the program, and how they’ve been developing their professional skills. For the second installment of our Intern Summer Series, we take an in-depth look at what our interns, Andi Wagner, Ashwin Ramakrishna, and Josh Reyes have been up to this summer!

Andi Wagner
Software Engineering Intern

Andi has spent the summer working as a Software Engineering Intern for the DataConnect Development Department where she has been developing an Apache Camel Extension for Actian DataConnect. Their work will allow for consumer use of Camel routes without extensive knowledge of the Apache Camel rules and framework making Actian DataConnect even more user-friendly and efficient.

Andi is happy to have developed proficiency in both DataConnect and Apache Camel, both of which they were unfamiliar with prior to her internship. She has also gained great insight into how software development occurs in a company and what it means to code professionally.

Andi will always be grateful for her Intern Orientation. She believes nothing could top that “best week” of fun activities and getting to know one another!

Ashwin Ramakrishna
Revenue Operations Analyst Intern

While at Actian, Ashwin works within the Business Development Team as the Revenue Operations Analyst Intern where they are developing an automated sales recommendation engine through Excel to simplify the pursuit and acquisition of leads. From hands-on experience, Ashwin now maintains a better understanding of what it is like to work within Revenue Operations and is well-versed in the lead-to-sale conversion process.

Ashwin has learned so much from the consistent feedback and collaboration within the Development Team and credits the entire team for his growth, as they have been extremely welcoming and eager to share their thoughts and professional insight. This internship has also furthered Ashwin’s interest in revenue operations -they believe it to be an essential aspect of all industries- and would like to use their experiences at Actian to get further involved in this field. #ShoutOutRevOpsTeam!

Joshua Reyes
Finance Intern

Josh has spent his summer working as a Finance Intern for the Finance Department where he has primarily worked on developing forecasting models for the future yearly costs for each of Actian’s cloud service providers. He has enjoyed furthering his collaboration skills and his understanding of forecast model building.

Working full-time in a professional finance setting has given Josh hands-on experience in the flow and function of a working finance team. This experience has supported his passion for developmental financial planning and analysis, and he has enjoyed furthering his understanding of the tech industry and prowess for finance.

Josh is most grateful to have worked with such skilled professionals and to have learned from their mentorship and experiences. He would like shoutout his manager, Mike Laquian and Buddy, Chris Saulsbury, for their guidance and support!

If you are a student interested in gaining real-world experience and tangible skills and want to foster your own professional growth in a flexible virtual setting, we encourage you to submit your resume for consideration for our Actian Summer Internship Program!

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae Coffman-Bueb is Director of Employee Experience at Actian, dedicated to enhancing organizational culture. With a background in People Operations, Rae has implemented global best practices that empower teams and streamline HR processes. She provides guidance on talent development, onboarding, and cross-functional collaboration. Rae's blog posts focus on employee engagement, internal communications, and HR innovations. Check them out for tips on boosting workplace satisfaction.

In true LWT fashion, we have to start out this blog with a ✋! As part of Pride Month, I had the honor of attending one of tech’s most highly anticipated annual events, Lesbians Who Tech #PrideSummit2022, which was held virtually from June 6 – June 10.

Actian is a proud sponsor of Lesbians Who Tech, as they embody what it means to hold space, amplify underrepresented voices, and shine a light on crucial issues the LGBTQIAP+ community faces as it relates to the tech industry and beyond. As an early attendee of the LWT Pride Summit, I realized Lesbians Who Tech and Actian would be a perfect pairing as Actian looks to expand our own diversity and inclusion efforts to support our large base of LGBTQIAP + employees.

Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit is an event I look forward to all year, and this year was no exception. With a stacked lineup of speakers discussing topics ranging from political issues to creating inclusivity within the tech industry, I was excited to dive in and learn how to best advocate for positive and impactful change for the LGBTQIAP + employees within Actian.

This year, with the main conference held virtually, I was able to attend a wide variety of sessions and workshops. Without further ado, here are my highlights from Lesbians Who Tech Pride Summit 2022 and key takeaways on how we can all become more involved!

Implementing Gender-Affirming Care Offerings

Due to the current political climate, many speakers focused their sessions on advocating for trans rights in the workplace.

Heidi Schriefer, Vice President of People & Places at Grindr, delivered a superb presentation on how Grindr developed its Gender Affirming Care Benefits program, which is one of the most progressive and inclusive benefit packages for trans and queer employees I have seen. Grindr has committed itself to providing expanded access to Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) to their transgender employees as well as establishing a Gender Affirmation Fund, which eliminates financial obstacles to surgical, social, and legal care.

What stood out most about Heidi’s presentation is how strong of an ally to the LGBTQIAP + community she is, and how she feels empowered through her allyship to enact momentous change within her company – allowing trans employees to receive the care they need and deserve, as well as often overlooked disparity of benefits for LGBTQIAP+ employees. Grindr is an excellent example of how companies can be doing more to support trans employees as they embark on their transition journey.

How to Own Your Career Authentically

Another standout session I attended was that of Keshona Lawrence, Platform Support and Experience Manager at Twitter. Kenosha’s speech focused on “only-ness” that many minority queer employees can experience in the workplace.

She explained how oftentimes minority and queer employees can feel as though they are the only person in the room, with no other employees who can relate to the struggles of being an intersectional queer employee. Dealing with this “only-ness” can cause many to minimize, tone-down, or shy away from their authentic selves in the workplace.

Kenosha shared her own personal struggles with “only-ness” and detailed that by holding her employers accountable and requiring them to create space and inclusive policies for those who feel underrepresented, she finally gained the courage to step into her own power and make her voice heard.

Learning Your Work Love Language in the Workplace

One thing I love about the Pride Summit are the engaging workshops offered throughout the course of the conference. A workshop I found extremely interesting was held by Brittney Aston, Community Manager at NextDoor, which explored employees’ different love languages within the workplace. We learned how to identify a person’s love language and develop effective cross-functional communication methods based on each love language category. This workshop was a great learning opportunity for myself, where I discovered tangible solutions that I can apply in my future work at Actian.

Key Takeaways

With so many amazing discussions, workshops, and networking events, Lesbians Who Tech #PrideSummit 2022 left me feeling well-equipped and ready to apply what I learned to future DE&I policies at Actian to better support our employees. With this in mind, here are a few things I took away from the conference and how we’re looking to implement further change at Actian in the future:

Have more informed conversations with our insurance brokers on how we can address some of the key areas noted across discussions on trans healthcare
As we continue with forming our DEIB Council, things to keep in mind to ensure equitability
Review opportunities create more inclusive naming policies and practices – decades old language defaults in tech are problematic and can introduce harmful microaggressions.

With the benefit of sponsoring the event, Actian had the opportunity to meet a number of qualified candidates. We are excited to have been able to onboard following those connections and look forward to supporting and enabling their success here at Actian!

One reason I love working at Actian is their continuous commitment to better themselves as a company and to always provide their employees with a work environment where they feel safe and supported. I am thrilled to work for and partner with a company committed to supporting our LGBTQIAP + employees to ensure their utmost success and happiness while working at Actian.

Are you ready to make an impact on the world and change the face of data management and integration? Join our team of enthusiastic, talented minds in a diverse, collaborative environment where you can thrive and grow. Learn more about our career openings at https://www.actian.com/company/careers/.

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae Coffman-Bueb is Director of Employee Experience at Actian, dedicated to enhancing organizational culture. With a background in People Operations, Rae has implemented global best practices that empower teams and streamline HR processes. She provides guidance on talent development, onboarding, and cross-functional collaboration. Rae's blog posts focus on employee engagement, internal communications, and HR innovations. Check them out for tips on boosting workplace satisfaction.

It’s National Intern Day, which means it’s time to talk about Actian’s Summer Internship Program! Since launching this 12-week program in 2020, Actian’s internships have been centralized around intern capstone projects, and engaging virtual events, all while being fully remote – this year however, they were able to add the exciting addition of a hybrid-remote Intern Orientation.

My name is Gabrielle Kray, and I am halfway through my internship as Actian’s Employee Experience Intern. I have learned so much about the People field these past 7-weeks and have felt appreciated for what I have brought to the table every step of the way. Being a global organization, it has also been an exciting time of meeting and working with people cross-functionally. I am looking forward to learning more as I continue my internship but let’s talk about what has been going on so far!

The first thing to note about Actian’s internship program is that every internship has a capstone project. This project is meant to be the interns’ focus, where over the course of the twelve weeks they will be able to plan, organize, and complete it with the guidance of their manager and buddy. As Actian is a remote-first organization, this helps ensure that interns do not fall into the pitfalls of other internships – where interns are brought on as less expensive, temporary workers, with unfocused objectives or relegated meaningless tasks. This helps ensure that it is a learning experience that benefits the interns, as well as the organization.

The project I am working on this summer is to migrate Actian’s New Hire Orientation to an asynchronous format, that a new hire can go through at their own pace. The benefits to this would be that the program will be digestible, and engaging, and it provides us an opportunity to be more thorough. What’s more, it will provide course materials they can return to in case they need reference information. In addition to the asynchronous orientation, there will also be a monthly synchronous gathering of new hires to answer all their questions, provide a networking opportunity, and offer engagement with our leadership. Altogether, this orientation will be a proper welcome to our company!

So far, I have planned out how the orientation will flow, generated ideas on how to create an engaging program, and got to work creating the materials we will be presenting. Soon, with the help of the Employee Experience Team, I will be recording content and uploading it to the course to our internal platform Actian Academy! I have faced challenges, like worrying I would not reach my completion goals, or not always feeling like I knew all the content I like I should, but in the end, everything was a learning curve, and my team had my back. It is really satisfying to see how the first half of my internship, which was spent learning the ins and outs of new hire orientation and creating a game plan with my team, is starting to come to life!

The second feature to note about our internship is that it has been fully remote (outside of the optional in-person attendance of Intern Orientation). Actian has provided all the essentials for completing our projects, along with structured learning plans, and we don’t even have to worry about commuting! As with most remote first companies, we communicate through chat, email, and video calls. We also have employee events and weekly intern events to give us space to connect.

Speaking of weekly intern events, we recently had an exciting one. Rae Coffman-Bueb and Sara Lou, who direct the intern program, sent each of us a small kit that included tea candles, a small lighter, and all the necessary ingredients for s’mores! The event was called “Tiny Camp Fire” where we lit three little tea lights in a triangle and roasted ‘mallows while telling spooky stories. I certainly got the chills!

This year, we had an aspect to the internship program that hadn’t been an option until now – the ability to attend Intern Orientation in-person at the Round Rock, Texas office! Those that wanted to were flown in from all over the country, where we got to not only attend the hybrid orientation, but also get in some team building time too! My fondest memory was when we all bussed down to the Congress Avenue Bridge and watched thousands of bats flood the sky during their migration. We then made our way down to the round rock for which the city of Round Rock was named and took this iconic picture:

It was such a blast, and I hope that in future years the in-person orientations will continue!

As this is International Intern Day, I would like to introduce our group of Actian’s 2022 interns. They are a phenomenal bunch!

Ashwin Ramakrishna (he/they)
Revenue Operations Analyst Intern

Ashwin Ramakrishna is from Saratoga, California. He attends UC Davis and is an incoming Junior in Economics. In Actian, they are currently working to automate the sales recommendation engine process to make analysis in lead processing more efficient. He learned about the internship through his family friend who is an Actian Employee and thought it would be an incredible learning opportunity. In their free time, Ashwin teaches himself piano, and enjoys going to concerts.

Henry McKinney (he/him)
Cloud Operations Analyst Intern

Henry McKinney is Actian’s Cloud Operations Analyst Intern. He is currently studying at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, majoring in Psychology, and minoring in Math, Finance, and Analytics. He first found Actian through LinkedIn, met his manager, and decided it would be a wonderful place to work, especially with the opportunity to work in the cloud space.

Henry is currently assisting the project manager on the cloud operations team. Using JIRA, he is helping reorganize tasks, as well as implementing a new project type that has additional features such as timeline view and priority. He values getting this bird’s eye view of an IT operations team and understanding of an Agile mindset. He is learning how to make operations efficient and scalable by working with developers and project managers in the cloud space.

During his free time, he loves to read non-fiction, train for hockey, and learn about new tech.

Nikita Gaurihar (she/her)
Engineering Intern

Nikita Gaurihar is an Engineering Intern at Actian. She is currently pursuing a Master of Information Systems at the Northeastern University in Boston; however, she already has a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from India where she is from! She moved from India to the United States to gain more opportunities in roles that focus on data engineering, analytics, and Machine Learning.

During this internship, she is working on a project to design and develop a data pipeline solution to create a Data Vault Schema for Actian. She values the experience she is gaining by working with data, as it will bring her closer to her goal of becoming a Data Scientist!
When she is relaxing after work, she enjoys playing badminton with her husband & friends, or taking a stroll on the beach.

Linson Miranda (he/him)
Business Intelligence and Analytics Intern

Linson is pursuing his Master’s in Business Analytics at the University of Texas at Dallas. A techie at heart, he knew he wanted to work at an organization where he would have the opportunity to grow significantly as a summer intern and create an impact on the company’s future. And Actian was the perfect fit!

This summer, Linson is working as a Business Intelligence and Analytics Intern with the Customer Enablement & Revenue Operations team. Keeping in line with Actian’s aim to grow its market footprint, his capstone project revolves around building a customer 360 demo using the Actian Data Platform, their flagship product.

When he is not busy analyzing customer data or reading, Linson loves playing the guitar and binge-watching sit-coms!

Joshua Reyes (he/him)
Finance Intern

Josh is a Finance Major studying at the University of San Francisco. His aim this year was to gain experience in his field, and when he found this internship, he appreciated that it was specifically focused on financial analysis, which is his main interest! His internship capstone project is to create a financial forecasting model to predict future costs from cloud service vendors that Actian works with.

So far, Josh has valued experiencing the work environment and finds it interesting seeing the implementation of the skills he learned in college. When he wants to have a fun time, he enjoys hanging out with friends, watching sports, and going to the gym!

Riya Singla (she/her)
DevOps Intern

Riya is majoring in Computer Science at UT Austin. When she applied for Actian, she was originally interested in the Software Engineering internship, but when she received a recommendation to try out DevOps, she decided to go for it! As her main project this summer, Riya is writing a script to automatically deploy Terraform templates every time a git repository updates. During her experience as DevOps, she learned new perspective on software engineering, understanding that code in the writing process needs to be checked for a strong framework before it reaches a production environment. She hopes to return to the world of software engineering with this new perspective to enrich her work.

Maddie Heath (she/her)
Marketing Intern

Maddie Heath is from Carmel, Indiana, and a rising Junior at IU Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business. She first found the Actian Internship online and was excited at the opportunity to work within the technology industry! While her primary responsibilities are managing Actian’s blog and tagging content via UberFlip, she manages many different projects and continually offers support to the marketing team. Despite her allergies, Maddie is a cat person, and has two cats. She spends her time fundraising for charity through designing art and clothes and spending time with her family.

Andi Wagner (she/they)
Software Engineering Intern

Andi is based in Round Rock, Texas, close to the Actian office! They are currently a senior at the University of Dallas, majoring in Computer Science. When she came across this internship, they thought it would be a great learning and networking opportunity. What more, she found that based on the reviews online, employees loved the company, so she chose to apply!

Their main project this summer is to implement an Apache Camel extension into DataConnect, which will allow for the implementation of Camel routes seamlessly through the product. After work, Andi enjoys spending time with her dog, Loki, exploring, eating, and playing video games.

Matthew Jackson (he/him)
Zen Engineering Intern

Matt is from Round Rock, Texas, right by the Actian office! He is an incoming freshman for the Colorado School of Mines and will be studying Computer Science. He is an engineering intern, working with the team that manages Zen, Actian’s database management system. He started off his internship focusing on the migration from CMWiki to Confluence, by writing a program to scrape data from CMWiki, process it, and upload it all to Confluence. Once he completed this project, he started his next one, setting up an app that will serve as an example of how customers can use BRestful API in Btrieve 2. This will improve the implementation of the product for users. Outside of work, Matt really enjoys music. One of his favorite pastimes is busking on the street with his Jazz Band.

Gabrielle Kray (she/her)
Employee Experience Intern

Gabrielle is from Sunnyvale, California. She is an incoming freshman at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. This summer she joined the Employee Experience team as an intern, finding it the perfect opportunity to explore the field of HR. Her focus during her internship is to build an asynchronous new hire orientation that is digestible, engaging, and thorough. She found that this project gave her perspective on the needs and experiences of a new hire. After work, Gabrielle loves spending time with her family and friends, and taking short hikes in nature.

Written by Gabrielle Kray

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.