Rogue Media - Mobile App Creation & Launch

Rogue Media is a marketing and advertising company that offers various digital display screens and mobile display products for rent or lease. Their services include programming, displaying, setting up and broadcasting live or recorded moving pictures, animated advertisements, and textual support, all customized to their clients needs. Yvon Pepin, founder and owner of Rogue Media, was looking to expand his business by creating a new social media platform for students. His goal in creating this new platform, SOC (Students on Campus), was to provide a safe universal environment for students to connect and share ideas and stories with friends. Through Riipen’s Level UP remote internship program, Yvon teamed up with several students, including James Page, a St. Lawrence College student, to work on this exciting software engineering project.

James’ Level UP project for Rogue Media involved working on a system to carry out student validations as Yvon’s team prepared for beta testing the SOC app and launching it in the Google Play store. Throughout James’ time with the company, Yvon scheduled weekly checkpoints with him to discuss his progress. Despite the hierarchy of Yvon being an employer and James being a student, James’ Level UP project was a wonderful opportunity for him and Yvon to share their respective knowledge with each other. Yvon was able to offer his wisdom gained from many years as a business owner and James and his fellow students were able to show Yvon how to use programs such as Cascade, a strategic planning software. 

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For James, his work on the SOC app was refreshingly outside the scope of his previous formal work experience, having only worked on coding projects in school up to that point. His previous work experience primarily consisted of summer jobs working with children. Though he always enjoyed those jobs, James’ work on the SOC app opened his mind to the possibilities of where his passion for coding could take him in the future.

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James reflects on the impact of the Level UP remote internship program, and speaks of the tremendous benefits of the program.

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“As I'm getting older, coding seems more of a serious and actual tactical job,” said James. “Now that I'm actually studying and doing something I enjoy, I think I'm gonna stick with it for a little longer, see where it goes.” For James, the Level UP internship program is a win-win-win for students “You get experience, you get something to put on your resume and also you get something towards your student debt!”

Through his Level UP project, James gained valuable work experience, confirmed an exciting career path for himself, and, with the help of fellow students, was able to develop and publish a student-centric mobile application to the Google Play Store.

Thank you to James for sharing his experience on Riipen. To learn more about how you can get started with the Level UP remote internship program as a student or employer, visit the website here. ‍Stay up to date with the latest in higher education, experiential learning, and the future of work, subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, The Riipen Report.

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Riipen Level UP program is funded by the Government of Canada's Innovative Work-Integrated Learning (I-WIL) Initiatives program. The opinions and interpretations in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Government of Canada.

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