Like many undergrad students, we are all trying to get a job after we graduate. One of the ways one can boost their resume is by doing a resume which can get very competitive. The reason why most companies want people with a internship is because of how it forces them to develop code with the idea of being scalable and easy to read. This is what they call industry standard which most undergrads are not taught.
When you work in the labs you are using someone else’s code style that you have to adapt to. For example, public class properties have to be uppercase. Functions are to use snake case where as everything else uses camo Case. These are not very present when it comes to simply doing classwork and especially not true when it comes to your hackathon projects. Choosing good variable names are always something that many people talk about. But when it comes to doing research variable names really matter. For example in a for loop, in an undergraduate class it is very common to see something like this for i in objects but when it comes to working in the lab your code needs to look like this for object in objects this is much more closer to industry standard than the previous code.
Lab work forces you to use Github, yes that software that is consider the social network for coding. If you are at a hackathon you probably heard of that platform. This platform allows you to collaberate with other teammates very effectively. But one thing Github does best is with the tool of Git. Git is a version control system that makes you use branches in order to update your code. When working in labs you will need to push code. When doing so you will stage your code by creating a new branch forked from master(where the live code is). Then you will try to merge your code with master. During this phase you will need to test the merge to make sure that it is not only clean but does not break any of the features that are currently being worked on by other people.
Overall lab work can be fun and a very positive experience. This is because of how much you can learn in the lab and yet still be able to gain experience nothingless. As someone who works in research, some of the skills I have learned has really shaped the way my code looks and looking back to before I started working in a lab to now I can say that my code is close to production level..