Amid the battle of internship hunting, I was among the most stressed out. By the end of my third-year at Babson College in Boston, MA. I was certain that I wanted to get involved in the intersection between business and tech, and decided to do concentrations on Business Analytics & Information Technology. I believe that business is a way to make change and solve problems in the community, but tech is the tool to make all that happen.
Much as Babson has provided me with excellent resources, I personally feel that there’s a serious lack of technology and computer science classes at my business school. I came directly to higher education from Vietnam and unfortunately, coding is not offered as part of the official academic program in public schools there. I took/enrolled in my first coding class in my sophomore year at Wellesley College, which offers some cross-registration courses with Babson. Before then, I thought CSS is a name of an online video game.
Photo by Ahmed zayanon Unsplash
By the end of my third year, with not much tech background but a determination to pursue my tech career, apparently I felt like a clueless goldfish, swimming and swirling inside my own glass tank that I did not know how to break out of.
I was, however,rather fortunate
By May, I’d spent the last 2 months scattering out my resume to over lord-know-how-many companies in the US Right when I was about to return to Southeast Asia, someone from Fidelity Investment called me, and asked if I would like to interview for their technology internship position. I ended up going through their 2-round interview, and after 10 weeks , I can’t say how much I’m grateful for this amazing/stellar/inspiring/motivating opportunity.As a goldfish in a tiny aquarium, someone threw in a hook and set me free to swim through the ocean tides.
I was, admittedly, insanely nervous and intimidated, being the only intern in the NLP (Natural Language Processing) chapter not from a tech school or major.This organization’s space is alive and pulsating with constant energy.. The people are brilliant and process information and codes with lighting speed. I was working in a team of three and especially involved with the Virtual Assistant landscape.
Photo by Talia Cohenon Unsplash
- Self-learning
I can’t stress how important self-learning is. School will never teach you enough. At my third year, I decided it’s time to pick up Python again. I was interested in data analytics so I went on Coursera to find data course. I enrolled in two courses, one was a basic Python course The other was onPandas & Numpy, the very two basic and essential Python libraries for data science.. My schedule at Babson drove me insane, quite honestly. I was taking 18 credits and working part-time for a start-up remotely,so the only time I had was a two hour break in between my morning and afternoon classes, and the weekend. On the weekend, I would cram as much as possible, trying to finish a 1-month course in 2 weeks (to save time and money, of course! Saving money is essential as a business student.. I certainly was not an expert by the end of the course, but I did learn enough to use it at my internship. I used Pandas and Python for a project, which was building a notification system for when the model for a chatbot needs retraining. Seeing my Pandas course come in so handy was so motivating/inspirational/exciting
2. Always ask “Why”
It sounds cliche and simple but people, at least me, never really think about it. When working in a technical team, aka not being on the front lines like business people, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of jumping into the details and think about HOW to make something work but forget to think about WHY we need to make this work. What is the purpose of what we are building? Why are we doing this work? Who is directly benefiting from it and what return are we bringing to the stakeholders ? My client wants to achieve X, but is he considering the current state of Y?
A problem statement can be written in a 3 sentences but when you start to put the question mark Why Why Why, you realize there are more than one layer in it. “Why” is easily neglected, but it’s the core of building a solid business mindset, as well as tracking down a technical problem.
3. Always remember what gets you excited
In my last day, one of my mentors asked me “with no consideration to factors like the number of figures in your salary, location, etc, what kind of work would make you the most excited?”. When I’m 21 and try to learn everything and maybe fail a couple of times, no one will give me a second look for it. But I imagine as I grow older, and still question myself every single day,whether ‘“I’m satisfied working on this’, doesn’t seem as ideal. My mentor gave me motivation and a reminder of how important it is to be open-minded to being hungry for learning everything I can handle. But at the same time, Carefully observe how my interests form and evolve as I learn more of myself and my career.
4. “There are three types of people others will remember: people who are smart, people who work hard, and people who help them”.
When you are an intern in a field that you’re trying to learn more about, accept whatever tasks others don’t want . Jump in. Help with the seemingly mundane work that may bring a new opportunity you never knew because that little small thing can pop up in a conversation with someone who can connect you to a new opportunity.
5. You will never know enough…
I was a novice to NLP. I took some quantitative and Machine Learning classes at college, but had much to learn. It took me more than a week to get myself familiar with the different systems that various teams would use. My two teammates were so talented and they had a background related to NLP, in one way or another. Working with people with such a strong base of knowledge in this field, I tried to research and asked many questions. I have never used the database system that the company uses either, but was able to pick it up from some introductory courses online, and just exploring through practical tasks. Organizations use diverse means to construct their organization, store data, choose which tools to employ. The more important things is that how willing you are to spend some extra miles doing research and trying to pick up the new concept as fast as possible.
