How I Waited 3 Years for The Best 7 Weeks of My Life (so far) by Yogi
Hello, my name is Yogi.
I’m one of the Global Internship Program (GIP) participants for March-April 2018 period in Cloud Product (CPRD) division. I studied Computer Science at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) for my Bachelor Degree and I just finished my Master from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea.
My story with HDE goes way back. On August 1993 my Mom went to hospital to gave birth to me…
Wait.
Maybe not that far.
The 3 Years
Around 2014, an organization that helps companies find employees abroad (I believe), held a presentation event in our university. Several friends and I attended the event because it was around the period for us to find internship place (We are required to go to an internship in order to graduate). HDE was one of the companies introduced at the event but I did not really think much about it because at that time I already secured my internship location.
However my genius friend Iskandar Setiadi applied to HDE, did the challenge, and got accepted! I read about his internship story, attended his post-internship presentation, talked with him directly about it, and was really impressed with his experience (and also a bit jealous. Okay, a lot jealous. I’m just a human okay). I made up my mind that I had to go to Japan and join the same program.
You can find out about the program here. The first challenge was in Go language. After you completed the challenge, send your CV to the company and if they’re interested, they will schedule an interview with you. The interview is mostly about your experience in programming, explaining things in your CV, and they will ask about your understanding of the technologies used by the company. To be honest I don’t remember the detail of my application process because it happened a long time ago, but that’s how it went in general.
Several weeks went by and finally the good news came. I was accepted for the January 2015 internship period. I was psyched! I would be able to see snow with my own eyes (of all things). But the honeymoon period ended rather quickly. January was approaching but my working permit was yet to be issued. I needed some kind of Work Permit because I entered HDE through the organization (It’s Complicated). In the end, the work permit couldn’t come on time and I couldn’t do my internship at the designated period.
It was devastating. I didn’t want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but at the same time, I was already admitted to a graduate degree in Korea. I joined a research laboratory for my Master so a 7 weeks off for the internship is a NO NO. It means that I needed to ask HDE to delay my internship period for at least 2 years. I explained my condition to the HDE representative without much expectation.
To my surprise HDE generously allowed me to reschedule my internship until after my graduation. We arranged a new period which was a couple of months after my expected graduation time. Well, the problem has gone and now I should be able to study peacefully to better my future, right? WRONG.
Around the end of my second semester, my professor moved to another university and brought all of his children (a.k.a students) along to his new workplace. This was supposed to be a good thing because the new university has better reputation and university’s reputation plays an important role for job searching in Korea. However the timing of the move was really unfortunate for some senior members of the laboratory including myself.
Due to this move, I had to extend my study for one more semester. The extension was caused by some differences in graduation requirements between the two universities. But delaying my graduation meant that I would miss the HDE internship period again. I wasn’t even devastated anymore. I kind of made peace with the fact that internship-in-Japan and I might not have a future together. Because there’s no way a company that has thousands of applicants would be bothered to reschedule some random Indonesian boy not only once, but twice, right? WRONG AGAIN.
Until this day I’m still thankful to HDE for taking chances on me. The lesson that I learnt from this experience is that in general the company is really supportive to the internship participants. And we, as the candidates, have to be transparent about our condition, maintain good communication with the company representatives, and always be polite.
I don’t wish for my circumstance to happen to anyone else. However, I hope my story could encourage you to communicate more with HDE before your internship period, especially if you have some troubles or difficulties.
The 7 Weeks
The time that I had been waiting for finally arrived. To be honest I could not give you preparation tips like other interns because the only preparation that I did was to make sure I read my flight schedule correctly. So if you are reading this blog post now, your preparation is already better than mine.
In this section I shared the knowledges, experiences, impressions, and opinions that I gathered during my 7-week internship in HDE.
- Balance between education and contribution
One thing that I worry the most about having an internship is that if they only give me learning tasks and I could not contribute anything to the company or if they give me actual but really mundane tasks that I could not learn anything from the internship (that’s actually two things). From my experience, the GIP at HDE will give you the right balance between both education and contribution.
In the first part of the internship, we were given some small projects to learn about the software development process in HDE. The project covers the whole development cycle from requirements definition until deployment to the server. Since all my previous software projects were in smaller scale, this first project in HDE gave me insight of a proper development process.
After the first project, we were given DevOps training with another assignment. This second project opened my horizon of this field because although I might have heard about it before, it was my first time of having first-hand experience doing DevOps engineering. From this project I learnt about Continuous Integration (CI) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Learning these concepts in the internship was really useful because you don’t normally deal with them in personal or smaller organization’s projects.
For the last part of the internship, we were assigned to work on some actual projects. They can be related to HDE’s products or some internal system to be used by other employees, depends on the company needs at the time. Other employees who are in charge for the projects would supervise and guide the interns. I like this part of the internship a lot because no matter how small the impact of my work was, I felt like I could contribute and give back to the company that have given me a lot.
- Never get bored
No matter how fun the workload is, doing a same thing every day could get stale real quick. But in HDE that is not the case.
Every Wednesday evening there is Board Game Night. As described by the name, this event is about having fun with friends and eating free dinner. There are also some board games involved, I think. There are a wide array of varieties of board game to play with. You don’t have to worry if you don’t know the rule of the games, because other employees are kind enough to explain them to you (and destroy you in the game afterwards). My favorite game is “Secret Hitler” and it is totally not related to my political view. Overall the Board Game Nights are fun and you should join them.
Once in a month, a Monthly Technical Session (MTS) is held on Friday evening. In this session, members of developer team present their knowledge about some technical topics. Although most of the presenters are software developers, different backgrounds and interests of the employees bring good amount variety to the discussed topics. Normally there are 8–9 presenters in each sessions and as an intern you should always present in an MTS. So if there are two MTS in your internship period, consider yourself lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective of life).
HDE has a lot of activities involving food. For the first month of your internship period, you will have GIP Lunch three times a week with two employees from different departments. It is helpful because first, they can give you some insights about good places to eat around Shibuya, and second, you get to know more people from the company. The lunch is paid by the company which makes my wallet even happier. Another food-involving event is Communication Lunch that is held every two weeks in the office. The purpose of the event is pretty much the same, to encourage communication among employees, but this one is in company-wide scale.
- Life in Japan
Of course the life in Japan was a highlight in itself. I will tell you tidbits about different aspects of life that made the stay really special.
Foods. Food in Japan is awesome! I cannot emphasize this enough. I don’t have any allergies or restrictions so eating in Japan was a treat for me. A lot of Japanese foods are based on raw materials, such as raw fish, raw eggs, and even raw horse! Yes, that horse! The one that British policeman usually ride. It was crazy (delicious).
Japanese cuisine is well-known around the world so you might recognize the foods from Japanese restaurants in your country. However I assure you that the real ones are on a completely different level. I’ve eaten Tonkatsu (Pork Cutlet) thousand times in my life but when I ate the one in Mark City Shibuya (you should give it a try), my eyes were finally opened.
But it’s not like I eat unagi or Kobe beef for lunch everyday as well. Sometimes I spent too much in the previous weekend and had to save up in the next week (Which to be fair only happen like in 7 weekends). There are a lot of budget restaurants that could salvage you in this situation. Sukiya, Yoshinoya, Matsuya are some of the examples. If a restaurant’s name ends with “ya”, chances are it will provide you delicious foods with affordable price.
Eating bento from Seven Eleven is also a cheap alternative for your meal. They have wide variety of instant bentos, from rice to spaghetti, and the taste would not let you down. These bentos are also the trademark of Japanese convenient store so you could save up your money in style.
Train system. As I mentioned in the previous section of this post, I lived in Korea for around 2.5 years for my study. So I came to Japan thinking:
Well, I’m used to a complicated system of public transportation now. How bad could it be in Japan? I got this. — Me, circa March 4th 2018
Boy never have I been so wrong in my life.
The train system in Japan is so complicated that sometimes I question my IQ when I’m inside a station (looking at you, Shinjuku Station). One thing to note about Japanese train system is that there are several companies that provide train service within the country. So if you couldn’t find the line that you need to ride, chances are you are inside the wrong section of the station. This might sound trivial now but it caught me off-guard during the earlier period of my stay in Japan.
Another thing you have to keep in mind: There are several types of train in a same line and they stop at different stations (Local, Express, Limited Express, etc). You have to ensure what type of train is coming and whether it stops in your destination. If you’re going to big and popular stations, such as Shinjuku or Shibuya, this won’t be a problem but for the others don’t forget to check.
Travel. The first thing you have to realize regarding this topic is that unless you’re going to extend your stay in Japan, you won’t be able to visit all of the attractions. Temples, amusement parks, shopping centers, pick your priority. If you realize this early and plan your trips ahead, I think you will get the best of your weekends in Japan.
There are awesome places that are located far away from Tokyo, such as Osaka or Kyoto. Since you only get two days off every week, you’d want to optimize your time during the weekends. I recommend using midnight bus for traveling long distance. You could save some money because it’s cheaper and also you could depart Friday evening, arrive Saturday morning, and have the whole day exploring the places.
Another tip I could give you: If you want to experience Shinkansen but don’t want to spend too much for it, just find a shorter route to ride. I rode the Kyoto-Osaka Shinkansen for around 1,200 Yen. It took about 10 minutes which was more than enough to snap some pictures and to upload instagram stories.
The period of your GIP plays an important role in determining your experience in Japan. If you want to see sakura blooming, March-April period is the best one for you! If you are a tropical country boy like me and want to see some snow, you should register for the periods around December or January. Summer time has a lot of festivals and I believe autumn in Japan is beautiful as well.
My last travel tip would be don’t hesitate to indulge yourself in Japanese culture. Japan has a rich and wonderful culture and you should experience it as much as you can. From attending tea ceremony, wearing yukata, praying in temple, bathing in onsen, and many others that I could not mention. Do the things that you could not find in your home country and embrace the diversity of this world.
The Days-Filled-With-Amazing-Memories Afterwards
One conclusion that I made after I finished my internship is that Japan is a “DANGEROUS” place to live at, especially if you already have plan after your stay there. Because it will get you hooked and you will never want to leave ever. And for me personally, a significant reason of why I feel that way is because of HDE.
The 7 weeks I had for my GIP taught me a lot of lessons, not only from the work assignments but also from the people I met along the way. I can confidently say that it was worth every minute of the wait and I hope HDE would feel the same way too. I know that saying all these good things makes me seems like I have some personal agenda (which I do, HDE please hire me in the future) but in all seriousness, my overall experience with the company has been positive (except for the times when I lose at board game. I hate those)
For all the readers, I hope that this post could somewhat be useful to you. If you are a computer science (or similar field) student and haven’t applied for GIP Challenge, I encourage you to give it a try and see where it gets you. And for those of you who have been admitted and are currently waiting for your internship period, prepare for 7 (or 6 or 8) weeks full of awesomeness in Japan.
