From Intern to Developer: ITS’ Role in Growing Talent

This semester, ITS reached a record of 130 interns. Among the talented cohort, two particular interns stand out among the group: Matthew Hummel and Enchi Zheng. These two interns are diving into real-world projects that improve campus services and strengthen their technical skills.  

Matthew Hummel began interning with ITS in the spring of 2024. The projects he has worked on spanned from web content to full-scale application development. Over the course of his internship, he rewrote a Faculty Admin Code, launched the Student Union hours of operation page and began building Intern Connect — a multi-phase web page designed to streamline how ITS recruits interns.  

He started development for the Intern Connect app in February and pushed two development phases across roughly five months, adapting to a new backend when the project required switching from mySQL to Salesforce. Creating a large-scale web app from scratch and meeting tight deadlines were Matthew’s biggest hurdles, but he credits cross-team collaboration for keeping the project moving.  

“This internship has been the greatest introduction into real-world software engineering for me,” Matthew said.

 

I may have developed software here, but this role has also made me develop myself more than I ever could have imagined. Thank you, ITS!

Enchi Zheng joined ITS as an intern in the spring of 2025 and has been working with the Advanced Technical Services (ATS) team. His primary assignment as an intern is the campuswide rollout of Microsoft Intune, an advanced device-management system designed to standardize and secure FSU’s public computers.  

Deploying Intune across multiple public devices presented recurring challenges and inefficiencies during the rollout. Enchi and the ATS team tackled these by diagnosing backend issues, coordinating closely with Microsoft and writing new automation scripts that optimized deployment and made the process far more efficient. As one of the first technicians to help deploy Intune at FSU at scale, Enchi played a hands-on role in turning the project’s goals into measurable impact: greater security, better organization and a more reliable computing system for students, faculty and staff.  

While their roles differed, Matthew and Enchi both emphasized how ITS mentors and the department’s collaborative environment gave them the support they needed to turn classroom theory into real-world solutions. Want to learn more about the ITS intern program? Visit https://its.fsu.edu/about-its/initiatives/intern-cohort.