Henry Burkhardt ’26 travels to New York City for summer internship at tech startup

This summer, Henry Burkhardt ’26 has been in New York City interning at Tabs, a fast-growing tech startup, building an application for sending invoices. Both the organization and its surroundings enticed Burkhardt and have led to his professional development. 

Burkhardt’s main project this summer has been working on the payment portal, which he found to be particularly rewarding work, as it went beyond the typical rewriting of “invisible” projects — those that have little noticeable impact on the user — Burkhardt had been limited to previously. 

“The portal is more tangible,” said Burkhardt. “I can point to it and say, ‘I did this.’ It was already released, so it’s already being used by some businesses.” 

By working “end to end,” Burkhardt has been able to not just witness, but be involved in the process of going from an abstract idea to a real-world product. After going through the whole process, Burkhardt feels better equipped to build his own ideas in the future. 

Through his work at Tabs, Burkhardt has gained computer science knowledge beyond what he experienced in the classroom. He was eager to accept this internship opportunity in order to “see what it was like to do the work of the career I am setting myself up for” with a computer science degree. While having learned the “important foundations” at Carleton, Tabs was able to show Burkhardt the “actual process of building.” 

In practice, this looks like the design team giving Burkhardt a plan for the function of a webpage. From there, Burkhardt programmed out the page and how the different functions work using TypeScript, a version of JavaScript. To prepare for and execute these programs, Burkhardt was in constant communication with others at Tabs, both through meetings and the communal set up of his workspace, where he had easy access to other programmers. 

“It’s really cool, because I get to sit between everyone and learn about what different people do just through proximity,” said Burkhardt. 

Through the community at Tabs, Burkhardt has learned the expectations of being a member of this kind of startup. 

“When I thought about doing programming in the industry, I thought it would mostly be individual engineers in a super small niche, just working on one tiny product,” said Burkhardt. “At this startup, that’s not the case at all. Everyone works on everything. There is an expectation that no matter what you’re assigned, you can figure it out. It’s a good and challenging thing, and something that I didn’t anticipate going into it.”

Being in New York City also allowed Burkhardt to explore a vibrant music community, strengthening his interest in music, which he has fostered at Carleton through being a KRLX board member and a booking manager for the Cave. The music scene in NYC serves as a musical “background to the formal internship,” and consists of going to shows and talking to artists. Burkhardt always plugs the Cave at Carleton as a potential performance spot when talking to artists after a show!