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How to get an internship

Good day! The season for applying for internships to foreign companies is approaching and therefore I would like to bring to the attention of Habrahabr Eric Young 's article “How to Get an Internship” . It covers a fairly large amount of training for an internship in one post. I tried to reduce the number of errors and typos, but there will certainly be those, so write in private messages.

About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about my experience in various internships. Thanks to this post, I became more visible to recruiters and got a job at Google.


I also began to receive a lot of emails from students who had questions about internships. Every time I receive such a letter, my ego is approximately doubled. Thanks you.



In this post, I will share my strategy for an internship interview. I have long wanted to write something like that, but I was afraid that the post would be like a “universal answer”, because a large part of my success is luck.


Below I will list the points that I consider important:


# 1 Work on third-party projects


You do not need to be at Google to work on tasks that are solved there. Similarly, you do not need to work in a hedge fund to learn something about finances. Satisfy your interest by yourself!


Want to work in the field of animation? Here are some ideas for the project:



Want to become a software engineer?



Finance:



Work on third-party projects allows you to kill several birds with one stone at a time:



Do not worry about how impressive or new your projects will be - better concentrate on increasing your knowledge and training your creativity. A little experience with the company's products and technologies will give you a big advantage over the rest of the candidates.


Start as early as possible. The recruitment process does not begin at the time of the autumn set of interns. It starts when you want it.


# 2 Make your own website.


Here's a little secret: the more you promote yourself, the more recruiters will want to contact you. Creating your website will help to become much more noticeable.


Your website is essentially a summary in a more detailed form, but which is also your personal brand. Here are some examples of sites:




Your website performs several functions simultaneously:



With the help of such platforms as Github Pages, Google App Engine, Wordpress, Weebly, you can create a website for free. Domain names are very cheap - around $ 10 per year.


In addition to demonstrating your coaching abilities, you should create a list of your projects in such a way that it is understandable for people far from writing code. Even better, if you write notes to the blog and tutorials for your projects - what was done and how. Your site will become more popular if people find it useful .


The story that you tell through your website (forming the first impression of you) is crucial. If you do it right, recruiters will come running to you, like bees on honey.


# 3 Learn Computer Science


If you do not know what you want to do in the future, then choose the skills that will allow you to be the most flexible in the matter of choice of work. I advise you to study math + computer science (if you are interested in research) or drawing + computer science [double degree ... link to the wiki] (if you are more interested in the entertainment industry).


While studying at the undergraduate level, I thought I would study neuroscience , because "I can always study CS on my own." This was a big mistake:



In addition to the last point: I found that students studying neuroscience and programming in MATLAB had to deal with high-level research problems and work on experimental data. Other students did the "dirty" work in the laboratory (they prepared, collected pipettes of liquid) and shifted the code analysis to others.


Neuroscience is not the only area affected by technology. More software-based research will emerge in the near future. Good or bad, but in the future, scientists, doctors, lawyers will all be programmers.


Why is mathematics so important? It gives you the opportunity to work in a complex research position, if you want it. It is very difficult to transfer to a research team (for example, Google Research or Microsoft Research) with only one CS degree.


Although I could learn more interesting things in mathematics during my internship at Two Sigma, I could not get an internship in quant research, as my past experience defined me as a software developer. My failure was that I paid little attention to mathematics.


If you want to work in the film or gaming industry as a product manager, then the benefits of studying mathematics are not so obvious and it is better to study the illustration. I noticed this in Pixar: many technical directors would like to make a greater contribution to the script and the visual component, but found that they are “locked” in their position (for example, they have one “dude in cars”, one “girl in the shadows of vegetation " etc.)


If you are good at illustration, you can claim the role of Art Director or Story Artist. A person with this skill is also more free to choose a sphere of work: illustrators are needed everywhere, from design to comics and games. Illustration + CS is a powerful skill set .


But, frankly, math is more “safe”, more flexible and more profitable than drawing. It is also a wiser choice for the future, while other skills are not so much (design, law or business). Thus, I believe that drawing is incredibly valuable and should continue to practice it as a hobby.


In any case, study CS. They will feed you, pay the educational loan and open many doors. Do not despair if computer science seems difficult to you, or if your classmates have succeeded in this more than you. In my case, knowledge was able to linger in my head only to the third attempt to study programming.


If you are in the field of CS, then your possibilities are endless .


# 4 Look for diversity and experience


Your course subjects, extra classes and internship experience will have a big impact on the creative process. Diverse experience will give you the opportunity to approach the problem in different ways (which not every programmer can), and this will make you a unique and difficult-to-replace specialist.


Engage in courses outside your main profile, and they will bring something new to your projects. This does not mean “combine your interests only in order to combine all profiles into one”, becoming something like an Egyptologist-physicist (this is just an example invented, if you really are an Egyptologist-physicist, then do not take it seriously).


Instead, ideas from one profile can translate into a truly competitive advantage in another. For example:




Source: reed.edu




Pixar animation film "The Adventures of André and Wally B."



And now my personal experience: for several years I did research in the field of computational neuroscience in college, which shaped my vision of debugging complex simulations in the field of machine learning. Inspired by this, I conveyed the idea of ​​the project to my machine learning professor. He decided that it was a bad idea. But I still brought the project to life , and he helped get my current job.


Diverse experience will help you find original or even innovative ideas . Find what (as you think) the future stands for. If you are right, then the potential is huge.


# 5 Plan your next 10 years


Everyone has dreams.


Some people want to create Strong AI , others want to join the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and some want to become a father / mother by the age of 32, and some just want to live until the next day.


It is very important (even for an internship student) that your actions reflect who you want to become in the long run. Time is so valuable: do not waste time on work that does not provide the necessary experience. It's okay if you do not know what you want to do in the future, but then at least write out a list of life / career trajectories that you think will make you happy.


From time to time, reassess your life goals and how much your current work is exciting or gives the right experience. Ask yourself a few questions:



As a result, if you are planning something, then keep in mind that your physical, mental or financial health is not guaranteed - have a backup plan in case your intended plans go derailed.


PART 2


95% of what happens when applying for an internship I described above. The remaining 5% is an interview.


# 6 Try to skip the evaluation stage.


The first stage of most internship applications is a summary. A recruiter, who must read a large number of applications, stops his gaze on your resume for six seconds, then either proceeds to the next, or sends you a positive response.


Six seconds! This is enough to find the names of prestigious educational institutions, the names of companies and which programming languages ​​you know. The recruiter will also appreciate how neat and beautiful your resume looks. As a result, checking a resume is quite tedious, especially when it is necessary to evaluate inexperienced students.


Fortunately, there are several ways to skip this step:



By default, your resume should be in the case: everything is perfectly written and clearly written without typos. Carefully check each copy of the resume that you provide to the company.


Companies can also visit your classroom to interview students (Yelp, Microsoft, Google do it). This is very useful, and it is worth passing the interview with companies where you do not want to work. Not surprising, because recruiters in all companies can give more practical advice than anyone else.


Use your best efforts to avoid the resume submission stage. In truth, if the deadline for your offer is inexorably approaching, companies can transfer you directly to onsite interviews. Resume and telephone interviews are simply screening for onsite interviews, and the latter is much more important. Do not enter through the front door .


# 7 Telephone and onsite interviews


After the summary phase, a lot depends on you. Usually, one or two telephone interviews take place first, and then a five-hour onsight interview. A telephone interview is a miniature version of an onsite interview where you write your code in Google Doc or Etherpad.


The most important thing at this stage is how well you solve programmer tasks. If you solve problems quickly and correctly, behave normally and without excesses , then you will most likely get this job.


In my experience, the complexity of the interview depends on the salary and selectivity in the company. The most difficult interviews I had were at Google Deepmind, DE Shaw, Two Sigma, Quora and Vatic Labs (interviews in startups are usually stricter because they risk more than IT giants).


Google and Facebook are average. I did not pass the interview for the position of software developer in Pixar, so the interview was superficial and very simple. I also heard that the interview in Jane Street is the most difficult on the technical side (obviously very popular among MIT students).


Cracking the Coding Interview is the only book you need. Practical tasks in all the companies where I went, at about the same difficult level and the only advice is to constantly improve.


Financial institutions like DE Shaw or Jane Street love to ask questions about math. I recommend the following three books (in order of decreasing complexity):



Preparing for the whiteboard interview is similar to preparing for the SAT . The same loss of time, but content is important, so you still have to do it. There are several startups that are trying to move away from an imperfect interview system, but I'm not sure that they will succeed.


On the question of how to behave: be modest, confident, smile more often, ask good questions. Wear smart casual. Here's a tip on how to smile more often: imagine that the interviewer just offered you a job.


# 8 Be Mature


It is much easier to get an internship as a junior or senior student in college.


Getting an internship on Google / Facebook in the first year is quite rare, so don’t reproach yourself for not immediately getting an internship offer. Many companies skip freshmen’s resumes as part of company policy.


Some financial companies hire only undergraduates, because they fear for their intellectual property and do not want other companies to dismantle their interns next summer.


The university where you study is important. But if you spend time building your own name and a list of third-party projects, it will mean less and less. The same goes for age.


# 9 I got an internship. What to do?


Congratulations! Your internship is an opportunity, not a right.


These companies invest in your personal development and training, so you have to work hard to learn as much as possible. You owe this to the companies whose name decorates your resume, you owe these people who selected you for an internship and most of all, you owe those people who were also worthy of an internship like you, but did not get a job.


My offers for internships were very good, so I did not discuss the salary (I reserved this for a full-time internship). But you can try to discuss it if you want.


# 10 I did not get an internship this summer. What to do?


Fine! You can spend the summer working on whatever you want. Most interns have no such opportunity.



If you need money, then you should look for a temporary job.


# 11 Final Tips



Good luck, and thanks for reading.


')

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/309044/

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