The Woodlands, TX, January 21, 2003 - In 1990 Bill Gates said "Multimedia will be bigger than anything we know" and over the holidays Austin Mueller, a sophomore at the Academy of Science and Technology had a chance to learn all about this industry during his internship at the epic software group. Epic is a 12 year old multimedia development company located in a state-of-the-art production facility in the Woodlands, and Vic Cherubini, the President of epic, has worked with interns from the Academy for 10 years.
When asked how he got involved with epic Austin responded, "I was looking for an internship where I would put to use some of the things I was learning in school. I had heard good things about epic so I contacted by Mr. Cherubini." After reviewing the company's web site, Austin sent in a resume and cover letter and asked for an interview. "Mr. Cherubini invited me in and I toured the facilities. I was really excited. Mr. Cherubini said I was a good fit for the job, and seemed happy to have me apply," continued Austin. After a couple weeks the papers were cleared and Austin began his internship an hour after finishing his last final.
On the first day of work, Mr. Cherubini had Austin look over epic's website to try to find any errors that had been missed in the past. "I enjoyed doing this, it helped me to brush up on some of the HTML I hadn't used in a while. I later found out that Mr. Cherubini has all new interns go through this exercise to see how we pay attention to detail, and get us into the office work flow" said Austin.
The second day was much more intense. Although Austin was very experienced at building web pages with HTML epic had just landed a web development project that required a database programming language called PHP. "This project would really stretch my skills as a programmer and give me a change to demonstrate my talents with design tools such as Photoshop and Flash." Austin was assigned a work space next to Rod Afshar, a senior at the Academy who has been with epic for over three years. Rod co-authored the Microsoft Press book "Excel 2002, Plain and Simple", during his junior year while working at epic.
Together they created a new website for the "Business Marketing Association: Houston Chapter," the largest professional business-to-business marketing group in this area of the country. Austin sat besides Rod that first day and asked Rod some questions about PHP. Just like Austin, Rod learned PHP on the job at epic." The first day, Rod showed me the concept for the new website. It was dramatically different from anything I have seen before. Although Rod was only 18, Austin was impressed by how much he knew about database programming." Rod gave me an introduction to every tool I needed to know about and immediately had me coding pages in HTML and then converting them into PHP."
Over the next two weeks the site started to come together, and Austin turned his attention to creating design banners in Adobe Photoshop. Although the client asked for three conceptual designs, Austin created a total of 30 banners, and the client found it very difficult to decide on a favorite. At press time the site was almost complete, and is scheduled to go online at the end of February. You can see it by pointing your browser at: www.bmahouston.com
Austin's internship was concluded in January of 2003, but his work with epic has not. Austin was offered a job and excitedly accepted the opportunity. He now works for the epic Software Group Inc. "Austin is just the latest in a series of success stories with interns from the Academy of Science and Technology. He has proven himself on this project and now I would like to have Austin begin working on digital video editing and special effects" , said Cherubini.
