Last modified on August 25th, 2017
By Christina Burch

I want to start off by saying thank you to AppFolio for giving a high schooler a chance at a college-level marketing internship at AppFolio Property Manager. Sadly, the three months went by pretty quick. I spent my time split between marketing and I.T. doing whatever I could to help out. I was given a desk to call my own, a spot on the team, bagels on Mondays, and of course, access to the new ice machine.

AppFolio sponsored a hackathon at my school a while back. A hackathon is a competition where you have only a few days to build software from scratch to fix a problem. We had under 24 hours to make what we call Key Biometrics: based on your typing pattern our program could differentiate between you and a stranger, and log you in. This eliminates the need for complex passwords that are easy to forget. We used a lot of math and a lot of debugging. But our hard work was rewarded when my team won the award for the Best Use of Algorithms and Mathematics. You can check out how it works here. From this event, I became really interested in AppFolio as a leader in the technology space; the stars aligned and I landed a summer internship at their Santa Barbara headquarters.

At AppFolio, I was tasked with projects in areas like web performance and Search Engine Optimization, and I did a fair share of tasks around lead data quality to help Sales be more efficient. I also worked on optimizing social channels like YouTube; I uploaded many videos and thumbnail images, making sure they had a nice SEO-friendly description.

However, the most important thing that I will take away from this opportunity is what life is like working at a big company. Communication is critical and so is meeting your deadlines. You think you know this already, but until you see it in action, you don’t know what it really looks like. I now have a very good idea of what working with a big, supportive and collaborative team feels like; and it’s something I will never forget.

So thank you to my summertime coworkers for accepting me into the AppFolio community. I wish it wasn’t over but I have learned so much. It has been an honor working with such an awesome crowd, one I will miss very much.