Study Abroad

During the Summer of 2025, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the UF in Cape Town: Software Engineering and UX Design Internship Abroad program. The program lasted 5 weeks and had us focusing on developing applications to assist local community organizations in the work that they are doing. Under the guidance of our amazing professor Dr. Sanethia Thomas, I learned so much about software engineering and was able to see my work from a global perspective.

Shortly after arriving in Cape Town, we set out to meet with our various companies. My company, Safe Cities, is a community driven organization with a variety of programs designed to uplift the members of their community through activities such as skills development, leadership workshops, and empowering women in the community. For my internship I was tasked to work with Safe Cities' permaculture program. They were incredibly grateful to have a team of interns willing to work with them and were very eager to meet us. In our first meeting, they told us all of their ideas for what they wanted in their permaculture app to help manage their program.

Safe Cities had some ambitious ideas. They wanted an app that would allow for communication and management of their program. This included an information storage system for Safe Cities to share the knowledge they have gained over the years, a marketplace for farmers to sell their crops and communicate with one another, a scheduler system so that farmers could keep track of their tasks and what needs to get done, and a full admin management dashboard so that they had full control over the platform. It was an ambitious list with only a limited amount of time for development but our team was determined to deliver the best product we could.

Once planning was over, we were able to start the development process. The team and I worked diligently throughout the program, whether it was when we went into the office or during our down time in between our various cultural experiences and activities, we maximized the limited development time we had on the program. We worked closely with our professor and the Safe Cities team to deliver a quality product that would work for their unique situation. On this page, you can see some pictures taken during the development process of the app.

After 5 weeks of hard work on the project, we were finally ready to present it to the client. During the presentation we did a full live demo of the app and explained how every part of it worked. Safe Cities was ecstatic. They had been looking for a solution like this for years and they were so grateful to have a product like ours. It was incredibly rewarding to see their reactions and has made all of the long hours spent on the project completely worth it. I had an amazing time working with Safe Cities and I'm so excited to see how our app is able to impact their work for years to come.

In between our work on the project, we had plenty of opportunities to explore South Africa. We got to see some of the beautiful scenery of Cape Town including Table Mountain, Lion's Head, Chapman's Peak, and Cape Point. We saw countless wildlife including penguins, elephants, hippos, antelope, lions, and many more. We got to learn about the cultural history of South Africa through important experiences such as visiting the Slave Lodge, speaking with Lionel Davis, visiting the township of Khayelitsha, and seeing the District Six Museum. On our free days, we planned some exciting adventures including paragliding off of Signal Hill, sand boarding on the dunes, and riding ATVs.

Overall, this program has been one of the most valuable experiences of my college journey so far. I was able to learn so much more about software engineering, myself, and the world in such a short amount of time. Whether it be through the endless adventures we went on, the deeply impactful historical and cultural experiences, or the countless personal interactions with the local people, I became forever changed by this program. Going forward, I plan to take the new knowledge and experiences that I have gained and incorporate it into everything I do from my programming, to my interactions with people, to my perspective on the world.