About Chanl Health:
Roughly 20 to 30 percent of patients with cardiovascular conditions end up back in the hospital after 30 days due to not following their at-home care plan. Chanl Health, a biotech companion app, is designed to help patients stay on track.
To assist with the app’s development, Chanl Health will sometimes bring interns in, hiring them through the SciTech Internship Program.
“I think it’s important to give students a real-world experience prior to graduating,” said Jared Sieling, the CEO of Chanl Health. “And SciTech is a great way to find the candidates and then supplement some of the salary as well.”
When small business owners like Sieling hire students though SciTech, the state-funded program reimburses them for half of the wages paid to their interns (up to $2,500 per student) enabling small companies to hire more interns and offer competitive pay.
Meet the interns:
This past summer, Sieling welcomed a data analyst intern, Lakshmi Somala, and a software development intern, Raza Khalid to his team.
“I really enjoyed working on the redesign for one of the sections of our mobile app,” Khalid said. “That was fun because it’s creative. I love creative work, it’s more open ended. That design thought process has always been fun for me.”
At the time of his internship, Khalid was working on implementing the design, applying the new code and seeing how it showed up in the app. “The work I’m doing is directly connected to what I’m seeing in the company. So that impact is definitely fun for me to see.”
Though Somala enjoyed the variety of projects and the opportunity to collaborate with the Chanl Health team, his favorite task during his internship was working with the data.
“In school, the data set they give you to work with is often very clean and approachable. But these data sets are real so they had a lot of transforming and cleaning to do,” Somala said. “I learned that often times that’s one of the biggest processes when doing data analysis itself and that was really valuable.”
When it comes to what’s next after this experience, Khalid said, things are very up in the air. “I’m still figuring things out but I have a general sense of what kind of work I want to do and it’s very similar to the work I’m doing now. This experience has given me a sense of confirmation that I enjoy it, I see value in it and I see the impact that it has.”
Get involved
Make an impact on a future STEM professional’s life and strengthen your talent pipeline. Start planning your internship today at scitechmn.org. At least 200 wage matches are available on a first come, first hire basis between now and August 2021.
Are you a returning student? The new program year just started! Reactivate your account and start applying for internships today.