Making the Most of It: Takeaways From My WillowTree Internship
Nabeu Habetaslassa is a senior Choose Ohio First (COF) Excellence Fellowship in Computing (EFC) scholar majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Information Security at The Ohio State University. He is passionate about software engineering and currently serves as the Vice President of ColorStack at Ohio State, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of Black and Latinx computer science students that go on to start rewarding technical careers. Nabeu is especially interested in creating impactful software that can scale to reach millions of users.
In the summer of 2025, Nabeu worked as a software engineering intern at WillowTree, a digital product consultancy. He joined the Dairy Queen web team, which supports a platform with over nine million monthly users. Working within a cross-functional engineering team that included frontend, backend, and mobile developers, Nabeu gained hands-on industry experience completing sprints and contributing to production-level code. His projects ranged from fixing the location search feature, implementing styling for a new redesign, managing user tokens, tracking analytics, and strengthening CI/CD testing. This experience gave him valuable insight into how large-scale software systems are built and maintained collaboratively. It also reinforced his passion for developing software with meaningful impact.
Impact of the Choose Ohio First Scholarship Program
"The Choose Ohio First Scholarship program has opened many doors for me. Early in my college career, I faced a multitude of life challenges, which led to poor academic performance and doubts about whether I could continue pursuing higher education. This program provided me with an advisor who worked closely with me to plan my future and helped me gain acceptance into the Computer Science major. Now I am succeeding in the classroom, have valuable internship experience, and am preparing to graduate, none of which would have been possible without the support of this program".
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