If you have long wanted to go on a foreign internship, but do not know how to approach this, then this article is for you.

Fyodor Kitashov ( kitashov ), a 4th year student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, told what you need to do to go on an internship with full coverage, work on a speech recognition system at Cisco, see 20 US states, and why go back.



Find referral
Pass the interview
Preparing for the trip
Internship at Cisco
Conditions
Who did you talk to
What is remembered
What's next?
Hyde
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You can go on an internship after the second course, but few know about it. VKontakte is a group of " Foreign internships and fulltime in IT ", in which they are running a Google sign. It reflects current opportunities: which companies have already opened a set, when it will close approximately, can people with a Russian passport be served or not. Google and Facebook, for example, usually open a set in October.

Find referral

The main problem is that Google serves hundreds of thousands of people. If you overslept, your resume just will not have time to look. Therefore, all are reinsured and are looking for so-called referrals - employees of the company who directly throw your resume into the system. Such resumes first of all fall on the table for recruiters, but at the interview stage, this no longer gives any privileges.

You write in a social network to the person who works in Google:

- Hi, I'm Fedya. Can you please refer to Google, please?
- No problem. Throw CV.

After that, the mail you threw to him earlier received a message: “You were recommended to Google. Our recruiter will contact us within a week. ” They contacted you and as soon as they said: “It seems to us that your resume is good enough for you to go to us,” they immediately called the date for two 45-minute telephone interviews. They go either one by one or with a small time difference. In controversial situations, Google may schedule a third interview to make the final decision.

Now the system has changed. The referral sends your resume to the system, after which you have 30 days to apply for three vacancies on the site. This makes the waiting process somewhat uncertain, but still much more transparent than when submitting to the site without a referral.

Pass the interview

Algorithmic interview is about coding tasks. As in programming competitions, only easier. For one 45-minute interview, usually two tasks are given.

If a person has completed a basic course on algorithms, then it’s realistic to prepare for two or three months, if you solve several problems every day.

Such interviews are more or less similar for all companies, but there are different topics and solutions. At Google, they love dynamic programming and recursion.

In general, the process looks like this: call up the interviewer on Skype or Hangouts. You are asked to tell about yourself for about three minutes. In response, the person appears: “I develop advertising on Google. Let's go? You code in environments where syntax is not highlighted. For example, you have Google Doc open so that there is no autocompletion and such that you do not know how to spell while.

The interview lasts 45 minutes. Usually, the introductory part is five minutes, and then two puzzles, twenty minutes each. If you tightened the first, they may not give the second. Problems are often formulated in such a way that you need to ask additional questions in order to finally understand the condition. You clarify the condition, explain your decision out loud, write it in Google Doc, invent test examples. Ideally, you should be sure that the code will work.

Some companies like to insert a so-called behavioral interview in front of them: for 25 to 30 minutes they ask you questions from the series: “Tell us about a case in your life when you were not at odds with your superiors. And why? And how did you try to resolve this issue? What would you do if a person working next to you started doing this or that? ” Amazon and Microsoft love this.

Some banks are so fond of such interviews that automate them. The robot asks you questions, and you record the answers on camera.

Preparing for the trip

In mid-October, I went to Cisco, at the end of November, they called me for the first time to clarify my plans and check the level of English, in December I was contacted by a manager who was interested in my resume. In early January, there was a coding interview, in early February they said that I was accepted. I went in July. Usually by the beginning of spring you already know where you will work in the summer.

All interns in America travel on a special J1 student visa. On her separate line, even in Moscow, you can sign up for it. A month or two before the interview really find a slot.

At the interview they ask about your occupation, why are you going to the States, who pays and what keeps you in Russia. In essence, your task is to prove your connection with your homeland.

Sometimes you are sent to an administrative check for another 60 days to check your history. With me this was not.

Internship at Cisco

I have been improving speech recognition. For example, the same Siri still does not work well with accents. Australian, American and British, it recognizes well, and if you are from a very distant region of India, where only 50 million people speak your language, then most likely you have a very strange pronunciation in English, and the system may not understand you.

We took data from a database of accents, where several thousand people of different nationalities read the same piece of text, and tried to “bring closer” the sound of complex accents to American English. We ended up weak, but it was fun.



At the beginning of the internship, we and many other interns participated in many hackathons. There are many companies in the Valley that are interested in engineers, so competitions for programmers take place almost every weekend. On the hackathon from the international association of air transport, we took a top place with a project on smart selection of neighbors on board the aircraft - we seated sleeping people and screaming children in different parts of the plane, filling the space between them with people who like to talk. In the vicinity of San Francisco, important events from the world of technology often occur. Feel free to participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference or come to the Apple office after the presentation of the next iPhone to chat with the engineers. All this within an hour's drive.



Much of the internship depends on the manager, for example, the schedule. Sometimes I warned my manager: “This is a great festival, can I not work on Monday, but instead work on Saturday?”. They were released without problems.

Often, everything is OK: no one will penalize you for coming at 9:02, and not at 9:00. But usually on steep projects such a pace that if you fall out for a week, then, most likely, you will not have time to catch up. You really work because you work with adults and professionals. And if this is your first working experience, then you need to figure it out. Some teams set up stand-ups (meetings, where people from the team take turns telling about what was done yesterday) at 11-12 am, so at this point at least you have to wake up.

I know a girl who trained on Facebook in the summer in the search department. At her first month at two o'clock in the afternoon she always went to work because she was asleep until one o'clock. After a while, her manager said: “You have time for everything, everything is cool, but it is not very convenient for me to manage you, because I leave myself at seven in the evening. Maybe at least you can come by noon? We have no restrictions, just a request. ” Here in this format.

It is necessary to keep in mind that the internship is an interview, just stretched for twelve weeks, where the company looks, whether you are suitable for them or not. Your task is to learn as much as possible.

Conditions

Internship blanket everything. You are paid a visa, are given money for tickets. In some companies - the same Google or Facebook - you do not spend money on food, because it is always in the office. All interns have medical insurance.

People usually return from internships in the US with money savings for which you can live a year in Russia. In Europe, they usually pay less.

It happens in different ways with housing: the company either rents you an apartment for the duration of the internship, or you can take extra money and search for housing yourself. Cisco paid me an apartment. It was a big apartment, where once in two weeks I changed linen, took out the garbage, washed the dishes.

America is fun. Huge portions and cars. Cheap flights, good roads, followed by much better than public transport. I sincerely tried to count on the metro at the beginning of my internship, but then I scored and started to take a taxi everywhere. And Americans embellish most of what they say. This is unusual, but in terms of service - space. When a person tries to be your friend for at least those three minutes that you rent a car from him, this is very cool. In real life, you get tired of the incredible delight, which is completely unreal, but this is their style of communication.

Who did you talk to

Companies try to have interns communicate with each other. They not only hunt new people - it is also a very cool reputation story. If a person likes to work on Facebook, he will come and tell everyone how cool it is to work on Facebook, and more people will want on Facebook. So with every company. Therefore, usually at the very beginning small summits are held: they gather all the interns, occupy their common cause, do everything so that people get acquainted, so that they have their own group in WhatsApp or anywhere, so that you can always always communicate with people. First of all, your social circle is your colleagues and other interns, you at least have lunch together sometimes. By the third month of the internship, we formed a company of five people, with whom we traveled for a year. We looked in the format of "drive on the weekend" 20-25 states.



I was also interested in talking with people who have been living and working in the Valley for some time. I was looking for cool guys from different companies on LinkedIn, wrote them and drove them to lunch. But so few people do, I guess.

What is remembered

I did not expect such a stratification of the population. American cities are about areas.

Dear neighborhoods like Beverly in Los Angeles or Pacific Heights in San Francisco are located away from downtown, which is usually a less pleasant place. You can walk around the expensive area and in five minutes on foot, accidentally end up in something much less well-groomed. For example, an area can be cheap because the school is bad there, and the school is bad because the district is cheap. When you pay a tax, where you live, this tax goes to support all the structures around, including schools. The more expensive the district, the more money the schools get, the better they become. This is an endless circle. Therefore, the center of San Francisco, the center of Los Angeles, scary at night. There are wonderful bars there, but it wasn’t very comfortable for me to walk around San Francisco in the evening and I probably wouldn’t have parked the car in the center for the night in some quarters.

What's next?

I am interested in data analysis. In the West, if you have just graduated from a bachelor’s degree, you will most likely not be allowed to do something super-complex about research, because it’s accepted there that PhD students are already doing it. After four years of undergraduate studies, another five years of graduate school can go, during which in the summer you will be able to practice on interesting data analysis projects. For graduate students there are separate internships.

To get to an interesting project with computer vision, complex word processing is much more difficult, because there is a lineup of a couple of dozen PhD students from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, with whom you just have a hard time competing with a resume. If you are good enough, for example, you are the Kaggle Grand Master, you will spend time with interviews and you can easily prove that you are quite experienced for large research projects.

3 months before the end of the internship, I began to look for projects in Russia, on which I could work on my fourth year.

If by that time I’ve already drove to Google twice, it might have made sense to leave now, because when you are 21 years old and you are already developing YouTube, it’s fun. Or you develop something really interesting on Facebook: you programmed something of your own, you run a test for 5% of Facebook users, you watch how 110 million people react to this new feature.

I think that in the next three years I am in Russia, because here it is easier to get to the data analysis projects that interest me. I do not know yet where I will go to the magistracy, I choose. Most likely, it will be Fiztech or HSE. But I also plan to go on internships in the summer, and during the year I will probably work on large projects in Moscow.

Hyde:

Add to the group “ Foreign Internship and Full Time in IT ” and track interesting internships;

Find a person on LinkedIn or in the Telegram-channels, which will throw your resume into the internal system of the company;

Start preparing for an algorithmic interview. The sites leetcode.com , pramp.com , hackerrank.com , topcoder.com , code.google.com/codejam/resources , projecteuler.net and the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” will help.

And it will be useful to read the blogs of various interns and the internship FAQ .