The Life of an ML Intern
As a grad student looking for somewhere to complete my practicum requirement, I considered if I still wanted to continue work in tech. I knew I enjoyed coding, but I wasn’t sure what my next steps looked like. I felt pressure to look and act a certain way and declare it with unwavering confidence.
Like my initial feelings toward tech, my relationship with banking started on shaky ground as well. My first banking experience was with a large traditional bank where I would wait an hour on phone calls trying to reach an actual person to correct the bank’s clerical mistakes and random fees. Then my frustrations would compound. Like many American students, I was losing sleep over financial stress, particularly my banking experience.
Those were the mixture of thoughts that crossed my mind before deciding to intern at Varo. That’s why the positive company culture at Varo surprised me in many pleasant ways and changed my perspectives on the impact of banking and tech.
New Beginnings
On my first day of my internship, I attended a new employee group orientation and got a tour of the office. Even the new Chief Product Officer — Smith Forte was there too. The IT onboarding was very helpful and thorough. Everyone was very friendly in the office and I met new employees on different teams. Even the CEO Colin Walsh and the CTO Deep Varma remembered my name, which is such a welcoming feeling as an intern.
At the beginning, I decided to set a personal goal for myself. I would try to have one technical and one interpersonal conversation outside of my team everyday. This challenge helped me understand Varo’s product better and also learn whom I should ask for my cross-functional questions.
Next as I customized my dev environment setup with my favorite themes and plug-ins, I started to feel more at home. I learned a lot from the accessibility of our DevOps and data engineering teams. Before beginning any project in a new organization, the biggest pain point is often getting the team’s dev environment and database setup. It often becomes a long back and forth process before the actual project work begins. I was so relieved to have support in getting cloud infrastructure configured and all sorts of credentials up to speed quickly.
Hackathon
One of the highlights of my three month internship was participating in the company-wide Hackathon. Just before the event began, two new members joined my team and it was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with each other and finish a project in 48 hours. Our Hackathon project was to do a text analysis of app store reviews. Our team channeled our creativity and experimented with different modeling libraries. We even won the prize for best non-product!
Brown Bags
Outside of the technical projects, I frequented the brown bags and seminars hosted at the office. I attended lunchtime talks on topics ranging from photography tips to quality engineering to the history of banking. I had a lot of fun meeting other engineers and non-engineers at social events like Diwali, Halloween, Thanksgiving lunch, and going to the Exploratorium After Dark.
Pair Programming & Production
One of my favorite experiences during my internship was the opportunity to pair program with our senior machine learning engineers. Pair programming with the other engineers on my team helped me improve my development workflows and communicate problem-solving. I had the chance to pair program with other engineers on an NLP analysis and risk modeling project. When the time came to deploy again, I was able to feel less hesitation and more familiar with how to monitor and debug models in production. I call this excellent feeling “pair courage”!
As my internship is nearing its end, I can hardly believe how quickly time has flown by. I reflect on my experiences and appreciate the encouragement and mentorship here at Varo. I felt I had a good balance of both autonomy and support from my team. They trusted me with projects critical to the business and allowed me to experiment with different approaches.
Are you interested in interning for Varo? Please check out our careers page.
Fanny is an intern at Varo. She enjoys helping teams make sense of disparate data. She’s enthusiastic about open source and enjoys contributing to modeling tools.
