INTERNSHIP 2.0

As part of my internship at Essilor, I worked as a Data Science Intern. The first week of my internship, I traveled Rhode Island and New York to visit partner labs in order to understand their lab management system. I’ve got a different perspective of optical industry understanding the process and getting to meet experienced people from industry. The company also went through a merger during this period which was first time experience for me. In the five months I have been here, I have made more intellectual discoveries than I can count: all thanks to the incredible mentorship and patience of the team I have been working with.

Here are the top 10 things I learned during my internship, including both technical and non-technical lessons:

1) Kill the fear

Most of us are afraid of the unknown and the reaction of others. We need to get over it.

What you want to do is go over these 2 fears that prevent you from meeting strangers whether you’re in the street, in the bus, at school or in a bar/club. Of course you can’t talk to everyone (and you don’t need to) but I believe that people around you represent new opportunities. They’re future friends, co-workers or even girl/boyfriends. I’ve found that many people I encounter are approachable, but they are waiting for you to take the first step. Do not miss this chance.

All my projects I am working on during my internship are mainly due to me making the first step and proposing an idea. These small ideas are now a business case out for funding and need to be implemented globally across company.

2) Don’t reinvent the wheel

One of the things I discovered while I was working on my warranty orders automation project was that Yohan (Collegue) had set up an incredible Perl script, with his own fully-customized order entry use case which can be used as template to create a new use case.

Before I became familiar with the system, I was tempted to create certain Perl scripts to automate warranty orders. What I came to realize that there was basically no need for me to do so. In almost every case there was already a set of clear and flexible options available in Optifacts (Lab Management System) — like interchangeable Lego pieces — all at my fingertips. By creating unnecessary scripts, I would be cluttering up a structured and clean system, making it harder for people to navigate at a later stage.

3) Go out of your comfort zone to get rid of your prejudices

When you go away from everything you know, you make your own experience and go over your prejudices.

This was Friday and I was as usual listening to music and siting at my desk while Steve(manager) called me into a meeting asked me if you can work on Salesforce, C# to fix some of the website issues which are lying around from years. I am a “YES MAN” and replied obviously yes (fun fact : had no clue of any of the technology before) but as I started getting my hands dirty with it, things were a bit messy in the beginning but this is the time when you ask questions and learn from seniors(Wilston) and colleagues (Shobhit). I had a session with Justin to understand architecture of the website where I learned debugging in a fashion that I did not learn in my 2 years of software engineer work experience. Take every opportunity as a learning, you never know what you end learning, or you can make connections for life.

4) It’s all about sharing

Give without counting to others and you’ll receive much more.

I’ve always been very careful before connecting people from my network together. I used to believe that the more you’re the only connection between two people, the more powerful you are. I changed my mind on this point since I’ve been to the Essilor. People here are happy to introduce two people to give birth to new projects and opportunities.

Milgram said there’s only 6 degrees between you and every human on earth so by introducing and being introduced, you’ll connect with the whole world!

5) Know whom to talk to

One of the great things about this internship was that we were encouraged to reach out to members of other teams to discuss about our projects and get their view of how they would implement them. We learned to defer to their expertise in some respects, and to the judgement of our team in others.

For example, I was working on building a text classification model which involved natural language processing and code was written in python, but it was a tough task to integrate the latest technology with legacy system. Here’s where the conversation with eLink team was helpful, Nicole helped me understand the whole architecture and we were stuck as there was no way I can integrate my python code with existing system. But we found out a way to provide immediate relief to build a classifier by creating multiple pipelines in TIBCO environment and extracting the keywords out of the python code and using it in TIBCO to build a classifier. This helped us increase capture rate of orders for the month though it was not a full proof solution.

6) Ask questions—but more importantly, listen

Steve, manager, very kindly told me that “there are no stupid questions,” and that we are encouraged to ask whatever comes to mind.

I, on the other hand, firmly believe there is such thing as a stupid question. Usually those occur when you just haven’t been paying attention, or when you’re too lazy to think for yourself about what has been said. Asking questions is important, particularly when you genuinely don’t understand something. But listening to answers is even more so.

Take the time to listen to what is being said and think about it. It’s human nature to hear the words coming out of someone else’s mouth and start mentally preparing a response while they’re talking. Don’t do it. Pay attention to what you’re being told.

7) Your time is precious, always make the most of it

You need to organize your time meticulously to get the most out of every day especially when you are working along side study.

I am not a firm believer of using calendar, mobile apps or some form of technology to keep myself organized, I feel it’s too mechanical. So, I spent time tuning my mind to take care of it by itself. I may be late on some meeting or miss some critical things but eventually I adopt to a new way of remembering things which will make things way easier in future for me. I had four subjects in college and was working full time alongside, but never for a second I felt busy or a pressure situation, this speaks for it.

Internship is a time to try out multiple things to gauge your interest and time is key element which limits that, so proper use of time is the key.

8) Be meticulous

In the third week of my internship, I hit Ctrl + F to find a word I was searching for in my file. Then I must have accidentally hit the space bar, deleting the word entirely.

To my mortification, I didn’t notice that I had done this . It was something that would not have thrown an obvious error — otherwise our tests would have picked it up. Rather, it would have gone unnoticed and “failed silently”…

To avoid making my mistake, check out GitHub Desktop. It displays all the changes you’ve made to a file, and allows you to comb through line-by-line, one final time before committing. It’s easy to skip through this part. But taking the time to review your changes one last time before you commit / push can save you serious heart-ache — and embarrassment — at a later stage 

I can’t stress enough how important attention to detail is. One missing semi-colon in some languages can stop your code dead in its tracks. Other things are less insidious, but still annoying. Even simple things like checking your company’s Git commits to see how they write them will make you learn so much.

9) Be in the movement

If you are not moving, you’re dying (unless you’re meditating).

The most important thing which I learned from this internship is that there’s nothing worse than the routine. Things happen to you when you’re active and in movement. I have worked on multiple projects for different department helping them ease there routine procedures through automation creating value of their time and help organization. I have worked with partner labs (dvi labs) to create a pricing conversion script which reduces 80% of their daily excel activities. Also for the finance department to structure their invoices into csv from text files which enhanced my regular expressions knowledge. In short, when you are in the movement you learn.

If you believe in something go for it. If it’s hard, if it’s far, if there’re barriers, take your chance anyway you won’t regret it. JUMP!

10) Have Fun

At Essilor, we celebrate wins.

We have All hand meetings of IT department where we discuss strategies for next quarter and appreciate efforts of employees done in the last quarter. We celebrate Halloween, Diwali, Thanksgiving, Birthdays and all kind of stuff…..

It seems obvious, but people want to work around happy people. The whole point of the internship is to try to see if you are a good fit for the company — and vice versa. If you’re unhappy as an intern, chances are, you’ll be unhappy as a full-time employee. And no one wants that.

Lastly,

Big shout out goes to Greg Ericson and Steve Ciske for their incredible patience, mentorship and knowledge throughout my internship at Essilor. I would like to thank a ton of people which include Marlene, Asrar, Yohan, Wilston, Nicole, Ranjit, Audrey and my fellow interns for making this journey a wonderful one. I never imagined learning so much in such a short period of time — or having so much fun doing it. Thank you guys.

#UTDMSBA #Essilor

Credits :@Carmen@Thomas