Charles H. Dunham Scholarship
In conjunction with SAS Institute, the Department of Computer Science annually presents the Charles H. Dunham Scholarship to a student in their junior year based on academic achievement. The scholarship was established in 2002 by the SAS Institute and supported by friends and family of the late Mr. Dunham. Mr. Dunham was the founder of the IT organization at SAS and it is this organization that sponsors the internship. A 1975 graduate of Carolina and employee of the SAS Institute, Mr. Dunham passed away in 2002. The Dunham scholarship includes a cash award to the student and a summer internship at SAS. Internship jobs vary considerably each year. Here is a sampling of what prior year awardees have said about their experience at SAS.
“The internship I had at SAS Institute gave me the opportunity to get involved in work outside of the classroom that made an actual impact. I really enjoyed the fact that I was treated like a full-time employee, and that the code I wrote was essential to the software releases in each iteration. My experience taught me a lot about standard practices in software development. It was to my surprise that the code was well-controlled by the team. It was highly suggested that everyone must write integration and unit tests once a new feature is implemented in the application. The team leaders were well aware of the progress you made after the bi-weekly scrum meetings that were held. It gave us all insight into the work that everyone was doing and sometimes allowed others to help out with some suggestions. I have continued working part-time after the summer. I’m working as a full-stack developer. The web app is undergoing various upgrades for its new release, so they assign me the features that they want to be implemented as Agile stories. The frameworks I’m using are Angular and Spring.”
Jorge Fuentes, 2018
“I started the year-round internship (part-time) in August, followed by my summer internship at SAS. The HTML Common Components team (aka Commons), of which I am a member, focuses on building the UI components for consumers who are developers using the components to build SAS products. As an intern, I have been primarily helping out with features and defects of the common components by working with the commons-based application called Honeycomb.”
Daniel Lee, 2017
“At my time at SAS, I was assigned to a team responsible for maintaining the “middle-tier platform” for the core SAS analytics application. We basically monitored and maintained the core microservices among different docker containers and updated any architecture to fit any new standards. My project consisted of connecting some of these microservices to a command-line interface I created in Golang using REST API queries to allow customer system administrators to perform maintenance and monitor performance on their local platform while also allowing internal SAS developers to debug changes to the microservices all inside the command prompt. I worked mostly alone on this project under the supervision of my boss/mentor Zach, and he was the one to guide me through the mechanics of understanding the architecture, helping me when I got stuck, and connecting me to resources or helpful people on the team to keep me in the loop. I sat in a room of 3 different interns where we could talk a bit when we weren’t working and we were able to attend many of the SAS intern presentations and events they had planned. I was able to submit a final version of my product and documented everything myself for most of the company to use, and towards the end of the summer, SAS asked all the interns to make a poster about our projects to present to the company at an intern fair. As the end of the summer hit, I was fortunate enough to be asked about if I was interested in pursuing a full-time position with the company by my boss and as I went back to school I felt it was a great use of my summer.”
Luke Tannenbaum 2016
The scholarship is awarded to a junior during the spring semester. The student then works an internship at SAS that summer (the same calendar year), and the scholarship is applied to the academic year beginning the following fall semester (extending into the spring of the subsequent calendar year). The years listed below correspond to the spring semester in which the scholarship was awarded.