My Internship at Orfium

Why did I want to do an internship?

As university years are coming to an end, almost every young adult comes face to face with a quarter-life existential crisis. “What am I doing now?”, “How do I know that I am going to like working on what I studied?”, “Do I have the skills to have an actual job on what I studied?” are only a few of the questions buzzing in our heads as we pass the last few exams to finally get our much-wanted degree.

It is true that this period of our lives is both relieving and stressful, exciting and disappointing. We can all agree that (especially in Greece) there is a huge gap between academia and the industry world, that every student has to pass in order to start their career. It can admittedly be very intimidating. However, bridging this gap is a great opportunity. Its name, “internship”.

As an intern, I knew I would have the chance to apply what I have learned in university to help make something that actually brings some value to a company. I would learn new things, practice more on what I like doing and decide if this is something that I would enjoy doing as a future job (as university projects may be quite different from company projects). Also, I would be able to be introduced in the industry world, understanding how companies are organized and managed.

Why did I want to do an internship at Orfium?

As a student interested in Machine Learning and Data Science, I was really happy when I came across the internship opening at Orfium. After some time trying to find an internship on what I wanted to do, I realized that in Greece there are only a few companies that have such departments and even fewer that are also open to employing people with little to no working experience. The industry where Orfium specializes (music industry) was also a huge plus, as it is an interesting and complicated field that I was always curious to learn more about.

What did I expect being an intern to be like?

During the months between being accepted as an intern at Orfium and my first day in the company, my overthinking forced me to constantly make up scenarios about what my internship would be like. The stories of my friends doing their internships during that time were adding up to my excitement, even though some not-so-good experiences of theirs made me a bit worried as well. I was mainly afraid that I wouldn’t have any responsibilities, as it is often the case with interns or that I would have responsibilities that I wouldn’t have the skills to handle. I was also anxious about the working environment. Will they be friendly? Will they be helpful?

In the meantime, we had a meeting with my supervisors. They introduced themselves and they explained to me what I would be doing. They also gave me some material to study, so that I would be better prepared. This made a very good impression on me and relieved my worries. So I just waited for the beginning of the internship to come.

What being an intern at Orfium was like eventually?

Despite my worries, being an intern at Orfium exceeded my expectations.

First of all, since the first day, I realized how friendly and laid back everyone was. This immediately helped me relax and enjoy the process. The people I worked with were really fun, always happy to help and guide me through anything I needed.

Second of all, from day one, I was assigned to a project and I was responsible for it. This made me realize that, even though I had no prior experience, I was a trusted and valued member of the team and it encouraged me to work hard to deliver my best results. During that short amount of time (less than 2 months), I learned a lot of new things on various topics, both technical and soft skills that I’m sure will benefit me on many levels.

What was my project about?

The project I was assigned to, was to design a Genre Classification model for audio files. This model should take a song as input and identify which basic music genre our song belongs to.

The workflow can be described as an iterative process, with each iteration consisting of the following basic steps:

1. Research
2. Data preparation
3. Feature extraction
4. Model designing
5. Model training
6. Model evaluation

After a few iterations, the results were good enough to be able to deliver a first version of the genre classifier.

At that point, having completed the basic goal of my internship, I implemented an executable that wrapped up my work, incorporating the functionalities of feature extraction and genre classification for an audio file. I also made a presentation to the rest of the team where I presented my work, explaining the process and demonstrating the results.

What did I learn?

Now that my internship has almost come to an end, I can sit back for a moment and think about what this opportunity taught me. I can safely say that in only two months time, I learned more than what I would have learnt in one or maybe two semesters at university. On top of that, the learning process was more fun than I could have ever imagined.

First of all, I gained a great understanding of how a company like Orfium works. I learned about the different teams and departments, their roles and responsibilities, the processes and workflows. I experienced hands-on how a project is planned, how it is split into simple tasks and how different teams collaborate to accomplish these tasks.

Industry-wise, I was gently introduced to the basic concepts of the music industry. Even though the field is quite complicated, the training sessions we attended were to-the-point and clear enough to help me understand the challenges and opportunities there are, as well as the role of Orfium in it.

Working on my project, I learned how to start and plan a research project and how to organize my work so that I do things faster and better. I practiced more on things that I was already familiar with, like python and tensorflow/keras, but I was also introduced to new ones like signal processing, librosa, aws/sagemaker. Wrapping up my project, I learned how to produce something well documented and reusable and how to present my work to my teammates in a structured way.

What did I like the most?

It is difficult to decide what I liked the most about my internship as it was a really nice experience overall. However, I am really thankful for the people I met in Orfium. They helped me a lot and made the whole process of starting my first job so much fun and easy-going.

I also constantly felt that everything was well-organized and planned, so that I would always have the right amount of work to do. The project of Genre Classification was very interesting as well and made me want to learn more about signal processing and machine learning applications on audio.

What are my thoughts now that I’m almost done with my internship?

Now, looking back I am extremely happy with my choice to do my internship at Orfium and I am more than excited to continue my journey in the company as a Junior Data Scientist! :)