This blog post is AI-Assisted Content: Written by humans with a helping hand.

A little over a month into the summer, we sat down again with our 2026 interns to see how things are going. This included Colby Schroeder and Jackson Moffatt, both IT interns, along with Mark Johnson, our BI intern. Between projector upgrades, Claude certification exams and a server room alarm system, there has been no shortage of things to learn.

Here is what they had to say.

Q&A with Colby, Jackson and Mark

Q: What is something you all have learned since coming aboard?

Jackson: “For me, it has been efficiency on the job. The amount of systems we have in place here, using Slack, email threads and Freshdesk, is so much more integrated into our workflows than anything I have experienced before. Access to each other is easier than I have ever seen at any other job. Learning how to use those tools to be more efficient has been great, and I feel way more productive in this role.”

Mark: “Honestly, 99% of my focus has been AI. Everything Anthropic since I have been here. I have also branched out into other projects, like learning n8n and building bots in Slack, and I am working on some Sigma stuff with Bennett now that we have the data back for that. But most of my time has gone toward learning how to build agents at a production level.”

Q: Jackson, is that efficiency more about the tools themselves, the processes around them or the culture?

Jackson: “I think it starts with culture, honestly. It is a very specific hiring process, and the onboarding is way more thorough than other positions I have been in. People become integrated quicker because it is very much, this is how InterWorks does things, and we are all on the same systems. At my last job, every department did things differently. Using Teams worked for some departments, and others still relied on email and hoped for a response within two weeks. Here, since everyone uses the same systems, everything is integrated and efficient. Getting an appointment done in 15 minutes instead of two weeks is just a different world, and I like it a lot.”

Q: Mark, on the AI side, what use cases have you found most interesting so far?

Mark: “Most of it has lived on the theoretical side for me so far. I think that is the biggest gap between me and the people who have been here longer. They have not just designed and understood this stuff on a theoretical level, they have implemented it practically. As far as what I would use it for, I have thought about building workflows for my sister, who is a professor, to help auto-grade assignments and cut down on busy work, since that is where a lot of AI is already showing up for professors. On the personal side, I have not landed on much yet, though building something to help me understand Claude better, which I am sort of already doing by building an app to help me study, is probably the closest I have gotten.”

Q: Colby, what have you been working on and learning?

Colby: “Jackson and I worked on a project together upgrading the upstairs projector. I had never touched a projector before and knew nothing about them going in. We ran into all kinds of problems because the specs were different, so I sank about six hours into researching how it all works, how to install one and how to set it up properly. Being in this position brings so many opportunities to expand your knowledge, and that is really why I came here. There is always something new, and it is like drinking from a firehose constantly, but I enjoy it.”

Jackson: “Especially with us trying to fix problems that were already there. We had to figure out whether to mount it on the ceiling or the floor, and who could even approve that decision. Working through those different levels of yes and no was a lot.”

Q: What has been fun about the role or the people so far?

Colby: “What catches me off guard sometimes is how often we get together, weekly breakfasts, cookouts, food. I have not worked many other jobs, but it feels genuinely inclusive, and it is clear they value keeping morale up. Beyond that, the challenges themselves are fun. They engage your brain and push you to think hard and find new ways of figuring things out.”

Jackson: “For me it is the genuine employee experience team. In a lot of corporate environments, that kind of effort does not go much further than a pizza party every six months. Here, there is real thought put into making the employee experience better, and it has been awesome to see how they treat their people.”

Mark: “The most fun thing for me has actually been the excitement around everything happening in AI right now. Things are changing so fast that the Slack threads about it are still active well past 5 p.m. People are genuinely into it outside of work hours, not just because it is their job. Even the Claude certification process has changed a lot since I started, the cooldown period between attempts dropped from six months to two weeks, which is actually why I decided to take the exam again after missing it by two points the first time. Getting on a Slack thread at 7 a.m. with a coworker to talk through new exam prep materials says a lot about how much energy is around this stuff right now.”

Q: What are you looking forward to learning over the next month?

Mark: “I really want to get the Claude Architect Professional certification. I am right there with the Foundation cert, so if I can land that, I would like to go for Professional too. I should probably split my time a bit and focus more on Sigma as well, but if I could manage both certifications before the end of summer, that would be great.”

Jackson: “For me it is Network+, the CompTIA networking certification. I jumped into home lab work headfirst without a lot of theory, so it has been hours of troubleshooting on my own just to figure out what things mean as I go through the practical steps. Getting the theory side down will help a lot. I plan to study for it over the next couple of months and hopefully take it by September.”

Colby: “Another project I am looking forward to is in the server room. We are swapping out panels for the room alert alarm system, and I got the opportunity to take that on. I have been researching how it all works, and this week I am starting to take the old panel apart and put up the new one.”

More From Colby, Jackson and Mark Soon

A month and a half in, all three are already digging into real projects, from certification exams to server room hardware. We will check back in with them again later this summer to see how the projector, the alarm panel and those Claude exams turned out.