Love How You Learn

To start out the summer, all interns began by taking Level Up, a programming course, which taught us key elements of Ruby (both the regular and on Rails version) and software testing. This helped ensure that we all had relatively equal footing as we went on to work on our summer projects. Over the rest of the summer at Enova, I worked on our internal customer support application with a team of other interns. Over the course of this project, we gained a lot of experience with front-end development and agile project management.

My time at Enova was an awesome experience I could not have gotten anywhere else. Along with developing my main project, a mock server for testing API calls, I got a taste of the Go language through one-on-one meetings, went skydiving with my manager and gorged on the company’s seemingly endless supply of food. I developed a solid grounding in Enova’s tech stack through their killer training program, Level Up, and was given opportunities to dive into the company's codebase and get used to their workflow. Overall, the summer was a blast and I’m incredibly grateful for my time at Enova.

As an S&O Intern at Enova, I've had the fantastic opportunity to work on projects spanning S&O breadth: making a high-level dashboard for one of our departments, conducting a process-improvement investigation in the call center and redesigning the customer experience online. I got to know a multitude of people across the business; analytics, legal, call center and product managers were just some of the people/teams who I worked with to deliver results. The enthusiastic spirit of the people here is contagious, and everyone has been so supportive in helping me succeed.

My internship was a very rewarding experience — I got to sharpen my writing and coding skills in addition to maturing professionally. I also learned new languages that I hadn’t used before. All the people at Enova are very helpful and guide each other if needed. I had weekly meetings with my manager and my buddy that provided me with insightful and constructive reviews of my work. I was also provided with a lot of resources that I needed to be efficient and comfortable in the work environment. This helped me stay motivated and focused on my daily tasks.

As a member of the Marketing Analytics team, I focused on using data analysis and machine learning tools to explain and optimize Enova’s marketing efforts. My main project was focused on increasing customer retention for one of our United Kingdom brands, QuickQuid, by sorting customers into different email campaigns using a suite of modeling techniques. I learned a lot from the experience, including working knowledge of relational databases, machine learning techniques and computational software. My favorite part of working at Enova has been the collaborative and open environment. I’ve had a great time getting to know all my coworkers.

I have never learned so much in such a short amount of time. For the first few weeks of my internship, I learned basic Ruby on Rails and test engineering, none of which I had previous experience with. These skills were further enhanced throughout the summer as I worked on creating an internal application that mocks third-party responses used for testing. The people at Enova make up an amazing culture that revolves around working hard and having fun. Overall, I have learned many important software engineering principles during my internship, and I’ve made some amazing friends along the way.

Coming from research in Computational Neuroscience, Fraud Analytics exposed me to new kinds of data and a radically different production environment. I successfully transferred my computational skills and leveraged them to create software that liberated substantial amounts of data from financial documents. That data is intended for long-term analysis and immediate fraud prevention. The success of this project was due to an environment that provided guidance and resources, paired with a high degree of autonomy and trust. Compared to the long timeline of academic research, it was incredibly satisfying to see the products of my efforts put into production while I was still at the company.

As a Software Engineering intern, I started with four weeks of training for Ruby on Rails. Several full-time employees at Enova reviewed the code and provided feedback within a couple of days. Then I got to work with two other interns on the emailing system for NetCredit. Through this internship, I got more practice in agile development, gained knowledge of several new languages and had an opportunity to work with other talented developers.

I started my summer by developing a new system of credit risk models for NetCredit. One was to assess the default risk of the overall applicant pool and the other was to further segment low-risk applicants. I then developed a Python package to automatically pull information from several publicly available APIs (Facebook, Yelp, BBB) for Headway Capital small business applicants. Enova gave me the freedom to pursue new ideas and modeling techniques while at the same time providing clear goals and support for both projects. The internship was an invaluable opportunity to work on projects with real business impact while learning along the way.

Throughout the duration of my internship at Enova, I learned multiple new languages and frameworks while contributing to the company’s code base. After completing the training process, which taught me the basics of Ruby on Rails and test-driven development, I underwent extra training in the Ember.js framework for my project assignment. I then worked alongside two other interns to implement an emailing system for Enova’s in-house call center software. I utilized the various distributed services within Enova to populate the new front-end features with the necessary data. During my time at Enova, I experienced an amazing culture filled with intelligent people who made my time unforgettable.

This summer, I worked as a Portfolio Analytics intern on the UK team. My first project involved text analytics of customer emails, which I used to model patterns of customer behavior. For my second project, I created a nonlinear programming model to optimize Top-Ups, subject to my predicted model results for loan performance. Throughout my internship, I felt I had the perfect balance of autonomy and support. I was encouraged to take ownership of my projects and bring my own ideas and experience to the table, all while learning from the expertise of the analytics team.

Interns at Enova don't just do boring work that gets thrown away when the summer is over. After completing our training — which taught us Ruby on Rails, test-driven development and general best practices — I got to work on an account home upgrade for On Stride Financial. The projects I contributed to have allowed me to improve my front-end skills, taught me how to write and refactor tests and gave me the opportunity to learn from many talented developers. It was a great experience, and I feel lucky to have worked with such a talented and supportive team.

The thing about my internship at Enova that surprised me the most was how similarly we were treated to new, full-time hires. We went through the same training full times got, and we were then immediately assigned meaningful projects. The amount of freedom given to me on these projects was refreshing. With only the business requirements set in stone, everything involving the design and implementation of the features I worked on was up to me to decide. By the end of the summer, I had several features in production that benefitted the company, which I could truly call my own.

I’m currently a senior at Indiana University studying Public Financial Management, Business and Marketing. From the moment I accepted the offer with Enova’s Financial Planning & Analysis department, I knew I’d made the right decision. Be it care packages in the mail during finals or personalized emails detailing different projects I’d be working on throughout the summer, I knew Enova would give me the experience I’d need to further my career. I’ve learned much more about financial market and all areas of business than I ever thought possible. I’m a better student and professional thanks to Enova.

Working at Enova has been absolutely wonderful. The opportunities to learn here are endless. I worked on a relatively new brand — On Stride Financial — and I had to solve problems with full stack programming. I was given the freedom to make my own design decisions and found plenty of help from the amazing people here. My opinions were highly valued, even as an intern. Additionally, the work hard, play hard culture here really influenced me to not only get my work done, but also to meet amazing people.

The BI Summer Internship at Enova has been a highly rewarding experience. The highlight has been two financial summary dashboards with high visibility: One in the UK, viewed by the COO, and the other with Simplic, viewed by the Brazilian Finance Director. I have been well supported by my manager to make independent decisions in solving the tasks at hand, and I’ve enjoyed how the team believes in and encourages the "Best Answer Wins” culture. I’ve further honed my skills in Micro Strategy during my time here, and I highly appreciate all the support and encouragement I received. Last but not least — it has been fun. There’s been a lot of events, perks, free snacks, happy hours and boat rides.

As an intern in Portfolio Analytics, I had the opportunity to take on a project involving the loss reserves for a loan product. Being the owner of this project, I was able to extend my abilities in everything included in the analytics workflow: acquiring the field knowledge, obtaining data, coming up with model designs, making predictions and presenting the results. Most importantly, this project directly benefitted the business and could be put into production use. With the help of my incredible mentor and coworkers, this was truly a great internship experience that will be applicable to any kind of analytics I will undertake in the future.