By Morgan Hiew

I’ve just come to the end of a three month internship at OAX Foundation which has really helped shape my future career plans. I’m in my final year at HKUST studying business, but decided a little while ago that I wanted to have more of a technology focus after I leave university. That’s why I approached OAX about the internship — its work combines tech and finance, and so naturally appealed to my interests.

I was immediately set to work helping out with a number of key initiatives. Many of these revolved around the OAX project’s use of smart contracts. Using my business education, I compared typical business requirements with smart contracts to ensure alignment, and tested and deployed these smart contracts in an operational environment. I also developed diagrams for business model and code visualizations so the technology aspects of the project can be easily understood by business people.

One of the other major projects I got involved in during my time was with the prototype itself. Alongside helping create the demo video, I spent many hours on UX testing — joining the OAX community members in checking the prototype for bugs as well as assessing the look and feel.

I also helped the team who structured the airdrop, and got involved in all aspects of the marketing activities. This included working with the team at events such as Finwise last week, where I got to speak to lots of company founders about blockchain, their projects and to intro the OAX project to them.

From the beginning the team treated me like a full time employee and I was lucky enough to be given more responsibilities as I proved myself — I really got the sense of working in a firm that values and rewards your efforts, and I gained huge amounts of experience as a result. Over just a short period of time I feel like I have moved my skillset from business to technology, and set myself up really well for the future.

My most memorable moment was definitely the prototype launch and sharing in the team’s happiness and sense of achievement of what we’d achieved together. I really enjoyed the friendly and collaborative atmosphere: it’s given me a sense of the working life I want to go on and have. I’m going to carry on wearing my OAX t-shirt with pride!