Tiket Internship Insider Information: Your Tiket to Be a Business Intelligence Intern
Introduction
Authors: Sharon Regina and Sudhanta Dwitama
Hello, nice to meet you. I am Sharon Regina from James Cook University Singapore, majoring in Business Information Systems. Similar to many of you, I am a final year student who has an interest in the Data field and wanted to get first-hand exposure to what it is like to be a Business Intelligence Analyst in a start-up.
Hello as well from the other intern! I am Sudhanta Dwitama; currently a student at Universitas Indonesia, majoring in Mathematics. Like Sharon, I am also a final year student. Growing up, I’ve always liked working with numbers and logical systems (hence the math degree). However, only during university has my interest in data-related stuff begun and I feel that applying to tiket.com is a great opportunity for me to get my feet wet in the data field.
Since many of you, college students, are curious about the internship experience in tiket.com, one of Indonesia’s most established Online Travel Agents, we are thrilled to share our experience as a Business Intelligence (BI) intern.
Applying for an Internship at Tiket.com
For fellow students out there looking for internships, this section is for you! :)
There are a number of ways through which you can apply for an internship at tiket.com. Usually, job postings appear on websites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. For those who study at national universities in Indonesia, you can also find the related postings on the Kampus Merdeka job portal as part of the program. We ourselves came across the posting on LinkedIn where we got redirected to tiket.com’s career page. Regardless of where you find the job posting, it should still lead you to the career page to apply.
Now that we got the applying part out of the way, it’s time to answer “What should I put in my resume?”
SQL. SQL. SQL. Speaking from our experience here as BI interns and the types of tasks we are given, the most important skill to have is probably to write SQL queries. Being able to write queries is what allows BI people to pull all sorts of data to then do different things with the pulled data. Most of the time, it is half the work, and the other half is spent working with the data.
Technically, that’s it. SQL programming (more on this later) is the bare minimum skill that you need to have and not much more. Being able to use Tableau to make dashboards can be a huge plus as it is tiket.com’s main BI tool. Hence, if you are planning to learn how to create insightful dashboards specifically for tiket.com, Tableau should be your best choice over other tools (e.g. PowerBI). While we’re at it, being an Excel wizard or being able to use Python to analyze data can also be helpful. However, it should be reiterated that the points mentioned are not a requirement but only plus points.
One other skill that is important but maybe cliche is “learn from your mistakes”. You are bound to fail sometimes, be it on the job or in the interviews, you shouldn’t be discouraged and instead, try to learn from that failure. So, keep trying and we hope you succeed! :)
Systematic Process of Internship Application to tiket.com
After applying through tiket.com’s career page, the HR representative should contact you to begin processing your application which will then lead us to the second round, the Codility test.
Codility Test
For people who are completely new to this, simply put, Codility is a website where you can practice different programming languages. Two other similar websites are Hackerrank and Leetcode. These websites are sometimes used by companies to send a technical test to an applicant. Tiket uses Codility.
For the BI Intern role, the only type of programming language that you are going to be tested on is SQL. You have 2 hours for the test, and for each question, you are going to have to write a query based on the prompt given. To get more familiar with similar/typical problems that can be asked in Tiket’s, we highly encourage you to visit those websites and explore yourself. The problems that you could be given would fall somewhere in the ‘intermediate’ difficulty — think about foundational knowledge (yet very important) in SQL, such as CASE WHENs, CTEs, window functions, joins. If you can write SQL scripts using those keywords and functions, the questions should be no problem for you.
Once you pass the Codility test, the HR representative will set you up for the user interview.
User Interview
In the user interview, you are probably going to be asked to introduce yourself so have an introduction ready. Tiket has a pretty casual culture, so you don’t need to be too formal. You will also be asked about items/points you have written in your resume. So, you should expect questions related to your past experiences and projects if you have one. Since the interview can be quite long, not every second of it will be spent on answering questions related to your resume. There is also a technical interview part where you will be asked the same type of questions on the Codility test. However, it is conducted in real-time/live, which may require your additional explanation.
It’s understandable if you are a nervous wreck prior to the interview. But remember, this is the exact time for you to shine. So, talk about your past experiences proudly and try to enjoy every moment of them.
If you pass the interview, congratulations! You have completed the whole application process. Now all you have to do is discuss a few administrative things with HR, and you’ll be part of t-fam soon enough. :D
Working as a BI Intern at tiket.com
We started our internship amidst the pandemic when tiket.com implemented Work From Home arrangements. Hence, we did not have to work from the office in BCA Tower. Pretty convenient, right? In addition, the company also provides us with a MacBook Pro for work.
Routine
The BI team is divided into product verticals such as Transport, Entertainment, Platform, Accommodation and Pricing. In addition, we practice Agile methodologies, where the tasks are distributed in weekly sprints. Typically, we would start at 9 am with a Daily Check-In with our team vertical, where we share about our tasks assigned for that day or raise any inquiries with the team lead and other seniors. Then, at 12 pm, we would have our one-hour lunch break before continuing with our tasks. And finally, the whole BI team would gather at 5 pm for another End-of-Day Daily Checkpoint, where we share what we have accomplished. Other routines include the Grooming Session, where the team lead distributes tasks, Sprint Retrospective and Bonding Session, where we play games or have a sharing session.
Type of Tasks
Generally, the BI team’s job is to support the decision-making process of business users by ensuring it is data-driven through data visualization and analysis. Hence, when doing a task assessment, we usually discuss first with the product manager to know the task objectives before writing queries, building dashboards or doing analysis. Then, before handing in the final output, we need to tick the checklist that includes the following activities: a peer review and User Acceptance Test (UAT) to ensure the company standard is met.
- Query
Tiket.com utilizes Google Big Query as their SQL console and data warehouse. Before building a dashboard, we frequently need to define views or tables to be used as the dashboard input. For example, to create a Referral Fraud Dashboard to analyze the trends in the referral program misuse, we need first to define the key criteria of fraud and then join with the table that contains member information, refund, payment, etc. before setting the flags to determine if a particular user is a fraudster or not.
2. Dashboard
Tableau is the go-to data visualization tool in tiket.com. Therefore, it would be great to have some data viz software skills to boost your chance for internship acceptance. Our common practice is to present the potential dashboard layout (can be drawn by hand or using GoogleDocs) to the stakeholders during the task assessment. This first step is very crucial before we actually build the dashboard to ensure that the dashboard depicts what insightful information the stakeholders want to know.
3. Ad-hoc Analysis
Aside from building dashboards, the BI team is also in charge of proving hypotheses and making analyses, where sometimes the method is a statistical-based approach. One of the challenging tasks we experienced was extracting insights related to the outputs (e.g. search ranking results) produced by a machine learning model crafted by the DS (Data Science) team. For example, an analysis might suggest a lack of variety of products recommended by the model. As a result, the DS team can then use our insights to help determine the strengths and weaknesses of their model. And more importantly, they can leverage these insights for further improvements that they can integrate in the near future. We often encounter uncertainties in the claims during the review of insights we provide. If the patterns occur by chance, a specific statistical method can be applied to ensure that the claims we made have a strong foundation.
The description of tasks we have written in this article could be overwhelming and very demanding, but worry not! Your team lead will be your mentor who will assist you along the way; just be H.A.P.P.Y (Tiket’s core value)!
Working culture in Tiket.com BI Team
As you have probably guessed, Tiket.com has a flexible, start-up culture, which means a relatively young workforce, non-formal clothing (sneakers, jeans, t-shirts) and celebrates open communication between seniors and juniors. As interns, we are always welcome to have a one-to-one discussion with our team leads, who are also our mentors. If we have any inquiries, opinions or complaints, they would always share their experiences and give meaningful advice. More importantly, you are not expected to know everything!
Besides the welcoming and super helpful seniors, we were also invited to join numerous learning and development programs tiket.com held, such as the Lord of Codes, an internal hackathon, Learning Festival and a series of webinars hosted by great speakers including Ernest Prakasa and Pak Sandiaga Uno. We also received gift packages containing Tiket’s merchandise and a self-development book.
There are some points we would like to highlight regarding our experience here at tiket.com:
- As university students, we lacked a lot of technical knowledge and communication know-how when we first joined; however, the seniors always accommodated our questions and guided us through.
- If you are a full-time student, sometimes the work that needs to be done can be extremely overwhelming. If you need help, do not hesitate to raise the issue and seek assistance. The seniors are very supportive and understanding.
- The hardest part of being a BI is not the technical skills needed but the creativity in solving business problems.
- Always be curious about the company’s data. You can do 5W+1H questions for the data or reverse engineer from your senior’s queries. Again, don’t be afraid to ask.
- There are a lot of responsibilities behind every data presented since it directly influences the company’s decision-making so take the tasks seriously.
- Considering you are a part of the data team, it is not strange to encounter a lot of varieties imbued in the data while performing your analysis tasks. Each project always leads you to discover new things.
Conclusion
We hope that this article can shed some light on what it is like to be an intern at Tiket and possibly even encourage you to apply as well. So, what are you waiting for? Send your resume now and join our journey to simplify tourism!
