Patrick Touhy
Major(s): 4th year, Computer Science BS program, and Data Science BS
Interned at Casey's General Stores Headquarters
Patrick Touhy is a senior in the B.S. in Computer Science program at UIowa. This summer, Patrick worked as a software engineer intern in the accounting IT section at the headquarters of Casey’s General Stores in Ankeny, Iowa.
We connected with Patrick to hear highlights of his internship, what he learned, and advice he might have for current students considering a CS internship at Casey’s or other corporate offices:
Q.) What does a typical day look like in the IT department of Casey's HQ as a software engineer intern? What sort of projects do you work on?
“Our team used ‘mobbing’ instead of the usual independent-ticket style. We sat in a conference room most of the day working on the same problem together, so work moved fast and everyone always knew what was going on. My mentor sat next to me, which made it easy to ask questions in the moment.
“Because of that setup, I wasn’t assigned a long solo project for the whole internship. Most of my time went into shared production work around DailySales, Casey’s internal accounting and finance tool. We pulled fuel-sales data from Gilbarco pumps through the enterprise data lake (EDL) / Azure Databricks into DailySales (and on to Oracle ERP), covering 10K+ transactions a day. I also worked on Azure Bicep, CI/CD and .NET services. On scheduled innovation days outside normal mobbing, I built a store similarity tool on my own with Databricks Vector Search across Casey’s ~2,500 stores and a Looker Studio interface for peer benchmarking.”
Q.) What part of your academic training in CS have you relied on the most in your internship?
“Database Systems helped the most. I came in with a solid background in relational databases and SQL, which I used constantly for Databricks SQL, ETL, and understanding how sales data moved between systems. Software development habits (testing, Git, reading a large codebase) mattered every day too.”
Q.) What new CS skills have you gained, or new CS interests you want to pursue as a result of this internship?
“I gained practical cloud and data engineering skills: Azure, Databricks, PySpark, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code with Bicep, and secure auth with Managed Identity. Mobbing also taught me how to collaborate closely on production code. The vector search work on innovation days made me more interested in applied AI, retrieval, and embeddings, which I’m following into an ICRU research fellowship this year.”
Q.) Has this experience changed what you'd like to do with your degree in the future?
“Yes. It confirmed I want to build production systems where data engineering and AI overlap, not stay purely theoretical. I’m still weighing industry AI/ML engineering versus graduate school, but Casey’s made that direction much clearer.”
Q.) What is your advice to current students on seeking and serving an internship?
“Apply early and be able to explain what you built and what broke. Once you’re there, sit close to people who know the system, ask questions quickly, and lean into the team’s workflow even if it isn’t the classic 'one ticket per person' model. The fastest learning came from working on real production problems with people who used the software every day.”