I used to think engineering meant sitting alone and coding for hours, but my four months at Charta Health changed that. I spent my internship focusing on the people using our platform by forming long-term relationships with the healthcare professionals we serve. This shift taught me that my most important task wasn’t just shipping code, but honoring the human connection by ensuring that the software and custom EHR integrations we were building actually made a clinician's day a little easier. I loved immersing myself in a specific team’s set of problems to understand the administrative burdens and daily frustrations that can reduce the effectiveness of healthcare teams, and ultimately limit the availability of healthcare services. Being forward-deployed meant I was in the room seeing the specific workflow nuances that would have been easy to miss if I were looking only at technical requirements.
Startups move fast, and Charta Health is no exception. This fast pace creates a constant stream of new opportunities where I felt encouraged to help drive the product vision rather than just execute tasks. Even as an intern, I participated in high-level discussions about refactoring our infrastructure to support growing partnerships. I worked on building standardized agentic workflows to retrieve clinical documentation from electronic medical records systems and designed features to automate billing reconciliations directly within the EMR. Charta created space for thinking critically about these new implementations. Seeing how my technical contributions directly supported a clinician's day made the work feel much more meaningful.
My mentor and the rest of the team reinforced my learning by showing me that there is no single right way to be an engineer. The Charta team comes from diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds, which drives a shared understanding that building good software requires more than just technical precision. This understanding allows Charta to balance the typical speed of a startup with the intentional structure a student intern needs to actually learn about the tech industry and how it has evolved to address complex problems. I was given the ownership to test my limits within a framework that valued my growth. I’m eager to apply everything I learned at Charta to my own engineering career. And I can't wait to see what’s in store for the future of Charta Health.
Samantha is a second-year Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo with a passion for human factors and software for social good.