Intern Letter: Arav Ravula

Hello, my name is Arav Ravula and I started my internship with Pure Mentorship just over a month ago. I’m currently a rising senior and part of the IT intern Team. I enjoy playing basketball, watching movies, coding, learning new things, and generally being a curious person. I learned about Pure Mentorship through LinkedIn and it immediately struck me as a great opportunity. I chose to work for Pure Mentorship to join a collaborative environment where I could learn from others and continue building my skills, all while contributing to a meaningful cause.

As a member of the IT team, programming is much more than simply writing code. It involves various aspects, such as planning, developing, debugging, and more. My coding journey began with watching online tutorials, building personal projects, and taking courses offered at my school. I find programming to be an enriching and rewarding process, where I can take a vision or idea and carefully develop it into a tangible product.

During my time at Pure Mentorship, I had the opportunity to work on both the old and new websites. While the old website allowed me to ease into the new environment and get to know my team members, the majority of our growth as a team came through working on the new website.We faced unique and unexpected challenges including not being able to communicate properly due to all of us working from remote locations. One way I navigated this issue was by talking to Thenu and Vienna so we could understand the root cause of the issue and address it. The IT team found new ways to hold each other accountable and soon started becoming more efficient.

Being the youngest member of the IT team, I initially came into this position assuming I would be looking to everyone else for direction and guidance. However, this experience quickly transformed my perception of leadership. “Leadership” doesn’t necessarily mean there’s one person in charge of the group. Instead, each member of a group can be a leader in their own way. I learned that being a leader means taking initiative, reaching out to others, and even asking for help when I need it. Everyone here at Pure Mentorship wants everyone else to succeed and I think that is a really important value to have.

Implementing Peer Mentorship into my own community would include bringing awareness to the concept of mentorship. Many individuals don’t understand the value of having a mentor, and I believe it is important to encourage an open-minded approach towards mentorship. Also, many mentees eventually go on to become mentors themselves and this cycle of mentorship creates a continuous and enriching experience for future generations.

All in all, this internship was a remarkable learning experience for me, both in terms of growing my technical skills as well as growing my social skills. I hope this letter provides a bit of insight into what this experience meant to me and I hope you are all able to take something positive from it!