My Internship Journey at DSAID-DE
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation across all sectors in Singapore, including the public sector. Many businesses had to adapt to remote working and adopt digital tools to improve productivity. While most people are aware of SafeEntry and TraceTogether, they may not be familiar with the many other GovTech products and Smart Nation initiatives that have helped Singapore become one of the most digitalised governments in the world.
Earlier this year I had the privilege to intern at GovTech and learn from some of the most talented and dedicated people behind our Smart Nation projects. Throughout my eye-opening internship, I have not only learnt useful technical skills but also picked up other skills that allowed me to be more ready for the workplace.
In this post, I hope that by sharing my internship experience, I can encourage university students to try for an internship there.
My name is Yao Ying, and I am a final-year Information Systems student at Singapore Management University. For my four-month GovTech internship stint, I got to work on DIAB (Data Infrastructure in a Box), one of many products of the data engineering team in DSAID (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Division).
You can learn more about the data engineering team here:
Data Infrastructure as a Box
DIAB is a set of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scripts that will help agencies set up secure and compliant data infrastructure leveraging on our Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC) services, freeing them up to focus more on their core objectives. This project piqued my interest as I was applying for the internship because while I do have an interest in data engineering, I really wanted to level up my capabilities in building secure data infrastructures that are production-ready. On top of that, I wanted to expand and improve my general technical skillsets. These were my goals for this internship.
Right from the get-go, I was given two weeks to brush up my knowledge on solution architecture in AWS, and the open-source IaC software tool that is Terraform. Beyond that it was trial by fire (as my tech lead Colin puts it): I was tasked to refactor existing modules to gain familiarity with the codebase and with Terraform. While I was initially slow on the uptake, it was not long before I found myself buried deep within the Terraform and AWS documentation. Working with new tools and frameworks was certainly a challenge, but my team members were very approachable and more than happy to help me with debugging and solving other problems.
This internship gave me a thorough introduction to cloud security. On hindsight, it seems extremely obvious that cloud security is essential for data infrastructures used by the government. However, I would have never known how much I appreciate and respect cloud security until now. In school, many students including myself (unless in a class about cloud security) would not care about the security of whatever we are building. Students are usually concerned about just making sure that their proof-of-concept projects are in working conditions — just enough for a demonstration to the professor. I cannot begin to tell you just how many of my school and personal projects are laden with “FullAccess” permissions in roles created out of pure convenience. Coming in without a shred of knowledge on cloud security, I am very glad that DIAB set me up to cover one of my greatest gaps in technical knowledge.
Working in a mature organisation like GovTech will give you exposure to a wide range of projects, technologies, and workflows that you would not typically be exposed to in university. You will also be surrounded by experienced professionals who can mentor you and help you grow.
Workplace culture
Aside from getting to improve and hone my technical skills, the culture within DSAID, and especially the data engineering team, is nothing short of amazing. In addition to having the right exposure as mentioned above, I believe the workplace culture has had a significant impact on my personal growth and workplace readiness.
Continuous learning
In tech, shiny new tools and frameworks pop up now and then but not all of them will be immediately applicable to your use cases. It is easy to get disenfranchised from the constant stream of innovation. This is especially so in the realm of data engineering given the recent popularity of LLMs and other AI-driven systems. In the data engineering team, everyone is constantly trying to upgrade themselves by learning new skills, and staying up-to-date on the latest trends. My colleagues are also more than willing to discuss and share their professional insights with me.
Being in such an environment spurs me to spend about 20% of my time learning new tools and staying up to date with the latest technologies.
Inclusivity and community
Almost every two weeks, we would have personal sharing by different members of the team. Given that I am working remotely for most of the week, personal sharing helped bridge the gap between me and my colleagues. This allowed me to have many fun interactions throughout the day. Sometimes a well-timed joke over lunch in the pantry can brighten up my day. This made me treasure every personal interaction that I have had on the days that I go to the office. With every interaction, I learnt about my colleagues’ working styles, domain expertise, approach to learning, etcetera. This was especially important to me as I was still trying to find my footing in the working world.
All in all, the team’s attitude and my interaction with them were contagiously positive, and that made working at DSAID-DE an absolute joy.
Final thoughts
To me, this internship has been a fun and fulfilling one. If you are looking for an internship with GovTech, you need not worry about not being able to improve yourself. In a large tech-driven organisation such as GovTech, there will be countless opportunities for you to gain the exposure you need to help you bridge the gap between classes in university and the work you would have to do in your future job. I hope this post helped convince you to try for an internship at GovTech 😀
Find out more about our internship programme at go.gov.sg/govtechinternship.
