I came into RapDev this summer having never touched ServiceNow. I knew how to code, but everything else about the platform was brand new. What I didn't expect was how quickly that would stop mattering, or how deliberately the team went about it, letting me grow into the role more than I could have imagined.
Built Up, Not Thrown In
I wasn't handed weeks of training before anyone let me near real work, but I also wasn't dropped into the deep end on day one. I started on smaller pieces early on, things that were enough to get my hands on real, live work right away but scoped so I could actually learn the platform as I went instead of drowning in it. Each new task built on the last, and the scope kept growing as my understanding did.
That balance is the whole point. It's easy to either bore an intern with busywork or bury them with something way over their head. RapDev did neither. Even the small stuff early on was work that actually helped the team, not tasks invented to keep me occupied. That's what made the summer worth it in my eyes. I wasn't learning ServiceNow for its own sake; I was learning it because people were actually using what I built.
Say Yes, Figure It Out Later
RapDev has a phrase that I heard constantly: say yes, then figure it out later. It's basically how work got handed to me all summer, in increasing sizes. Say yes to automating something small the team was doing by hand, then figure out the tool that gets it done. A few months later, it became: say yes to something much bigger, then figure that out too.
That's how I ended up on the two bigger things I worked on this summer, where I was able to significantly rebuild and expand the customer-facing portal, and make major improvements to an internal tool for automating the creation of project retrospective documents. Neither of those was something I built from a blank page; both already existed, but by the end of the summer I was the one adding real functionality, fixing what didn't work, and shipping changes that people outside the engineering team actually noticed and relied on. That's its own kind of trust: handing an intern something live and already in use, and saying "make this better."
No Dumb Questions
RapDev prides itself on having some of the best engineers in the game, and that showed the moment I got here. What surprised me was that the talent never came with any arrogance. Nobody made me feel behind for not knowing something. Questions I was sure were far too basic got real, patient answers every time. That "no such thing as a dumb question" mentality did more for my learning curve than any documentation could have, and it says a lot about a culture that manages to hold onto that while still hiring people who are genuinely good at what they do.
That same openness carried over into how the team treated mistakes. Nobody wanted me second-guessing every move I made out of fear of getting something wrong, which is something that often comes with new work. Mistakes were treated as a normal part of moving fast and learning, not something to be afraid of, and that made me a lot more willing to try things I wasn't sure would work.
The Culture Behind the Code
By the end of the summer, the list of what I'd touched had grown well past what I expected. Real improvements to the customer portal, a rebuilt retrospective document flow, a bunch of platform automations running quietly in the background, a full migration of team dashboards onto a new analytics platform, and a ServiceNow Certified System Administrator certification along the way. None of that was on my radar when I walked in, not knowing the platform at all.
What actually got me there wasn't just being given harder things to do over time. It was my manager and everyone else I worked with being genuinely down to earth about it the whole way, answering the simple questions without making me feel small, and treating me like part of the team from week one instead of "just the intern." The technical growth mattered, but it was the culture underneath it that made the growth possible at all.
I went into the summer not even knowing what ServiceNow was, and through the support system I was given, I was able to have more impact than I could have ever predicted. I left having meaningfully rebuilt the tools people at RapDev use every day, learned an entire platform from scratch along the way, and figured out that the fastest way to grow into something you've never done is to work somewhere that pushes you to say yes first, alongside people who've got your back the whole way through. Want to grow somewhere that pushes you to say yes first? Check out our open roles on the RapDev careers page.
