No Internship? No Need to Fret! The Ultimate Guide to Self-Learning Your Summer to Success

The Covid-19 situation is every hopeful intern’s worst nightmare. Companies are not hiring as widely, offers are being rescinded, and it seems impossible to gain experience. However, there is a lot more you can do besides interning at a company! In this article, I have penned down alternatives to make the most out of your summer, and I hope this inspires you to continue pressing on. Even if you have already secured an internship, do read on; these resources can be used to supplement your internship as well. If you are serious about accomplishing something valuable during summer, then this article is for you. Here’s an overview:

1. Self-Learning Starts With Planning

What adds the most value to you? Which skills do you want to pick up? Here is how to decide. Also, find some friends!

2. Read Widely and In Depth, Take Notes

Read books relevant to your interests and gather different perspectives. You’ll be surprised; soft skills can be learnt through books too.

3. Online Courses and Websites

Utilise the free courses available. I share methods to make use of existing deals to obtain free certification.

4. OpenCourseWare

Reputable Universities have made their lectures, assignments, and quizzes available. Some resources for you.

5. Watch YouTube (Seriously!)

YouTube videos can be a source of valuable information and guidance.

6. Own a Project

Projects are the best way to practice and showcase your skills, be it related to finance, software engineering, data science, communications, marketing and more. Don’t just do it, own it.

7. Participate In Relevant Competitions

There are ongoing competitions that you can compete in and gain recognition for.

8. Volunteer In Relevant Roles

Charities and small businesses need your help too! You can make an impact while learning.

9. Continue Preparing and Applying For Internships

Even though it’s nearing summer, it doesn’t mean that companies have stopped recruiting and you should stop applying! More opportunities might come up along the way.

10. Intern For Free (But negotiate first)

Intern for free as a last resort, but start by negotiating for terms you’re comfortable with. The rationale and framework for negotiation.

11. Moving Forward: Building a Killer Resume

Great! You’ve learnt lots during the summer. Make sure to include it in your resume so that employers can see the work you’ve done and the initiative you’ve taken. The potential you have and an example of how your resume can look like.

12. Conclusion

I hope you’ve taken away something valuable from this guide. Do contribute your thoughts if any in the comments below, and share this article with others who can benefit from it too.

1. Self-Learning Starts With Planning

First, you have to plan and decide on what would add the most value to you. For example, if you already have a career goal in mind, think of the skills required and either learn a new one, or hone existing ones. If you don’t already have a career in mind, I urge you to decide on a job you’re open to pursue and pick up some relevant skills. In the process, you’ll also learn whether you enjoy the work, which is still a valuable outcome. I’ve found these especially useful for finding out where to start:

• Read up on job descriptions and take note of the skills required. However, some descriptions are vague for interns. To circumvent this, look at similar roles for full time positions. These are much clearer than internship descriptions.
• Gathering a group of like-minded friends is also a great way to start. You can plan together, learn the same concepts, compete in competitions, and pursue projects together. It’ll be more fun and you can help to keep each other’s progress in check!
• Look up your seniors’ profiles on LinkedIn and see what they have done.
• Cold message someone working in your desired role and ask them for guidance.
• Review the past semester in school and think of areas that could be improved on.

Now this is a very important point I can’t stress enough. This summer, don’t go through the motions just so you can add it to your resume. Have the right mindset and internalise everything so that you can retain the knowledge and use it in future interviews and internships to prove yourself. Remember that whatever you put on your resume, interviewers will ask and grill you about.

For those unable to decide, consider learning widely applicable skills such as programming. Many can agree that this is a core skill required to stay relevant in future and is bound to come in handy. However, this area might be challenging to navigate alone, and I am also in the middle of writing a programming/data science guide for those specifically interested in this area for more guidance.

2. Read Widely and In Depth, Take Notes

Read! Books are a valuable source of knowledge, and you’ll be surprised how informative and practical some of them are. Ask around for recommendations, look out for summaries and reviews to gauge the level of content, and pick up a few books offering different perspectives to broaden your view. Here are some resources for inspiration. Remember that hard skills aren’t the only things you can pick up through books; soft skills too:

• Sales and Human Resource - Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
• Investment Banking - Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers & Acquisitions by Joshua Rosenbaum and Joshua Pearl
• Data Science - Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn & TensorFlow by Aurelien Geron
• Investments - Principles For Navigating Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio, or Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham

Although informative, books can be heavy and time consuming to complete. You may be interested in learning smaller, bite-sized concepts. This is great as well. After reading up, think about how you can apply what you've learnt. Here are some bite-sized topics to get the ball rolling:

• Entrepreneurs - How do start-ups succeed? Read up about successful and unsuccessful startups. Come up with improvements to business models and how they can better improve. Think of a value proposition, a business model, and formulate a pitch for a startup.
• Human Resource - Diversity and Inclusion. How accretive is D&I for companies? Read up on best practices and outcomes. Research on what companies are doing and come up with strategies and recommendations.
• Investments - Negative interest rates and its impact on the economy. How does this affect banks, consumers, fiscal and monetary policy? What trade ideas can you come up with? Write a stock pitch or an industry report.

Every topic you begin working on can end up becoming a small project on its own!

3. Online Courses and Websites

Rigorous online courses have been the bread and butter in supplementing my academics. It took a bit of trial and error and using different platforms to find out which are good. Here are my favourites:

• Coursera - This course provider ranks on the top of my list because of the academic rigour and practicality of their courses. You have to work hard for these courses and certificates as they have quizzes and assignments that can take hours to complete. Here’s a tip: You have 7-day full access trials for courses and specialisations (made up of many courses). If you can complete it within the seven days, it’s free! You can also apply for financial aid.
• edX - Here, you can learn anything from six broader areas. Computer Science, Languages, Data Science, Business & Management, Engineering, Humanities. While some are paid courses, others are free (you only need to pay if you would like a certificate).
• Udemy - Great for beginners! Their courses are cheap and easy to understand. However, I would advise against using Udemy if you already have intermediate competency. The courses I’ve done had about 10 hours of content.
• Bloomberg Market Concepts - Head over to the NUS Bloomberg terminals to complete this (Or if your university has Bloomberg terminals)! It is an 8 hour course on finance concepts, and you’ll obtain a certificate upon completion free of charge.

4. OpenCourseWare

This is an initiative where universities have moved their course content online, accessible by anyone ALL FOR FREE. You’ll be able to access lectures, readings, in-class questions, code and more.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Stanford University
• Yale University
• University of Michigan
• Carnegie Mellon University
• University of California, Berkeley - Only on edX, with courses such as Marketing Analytics, Writing for Social Media, Empathy and Emotional Intelligence at Work (Who says you can’t pick up soft skills online?).

5. Watch YouTube (Seriously!)

YouTube may be perceived as unstructured, but you’ll be surprised at the amount of knowledge that can be obtained. Here are some resources for example (Although I only know of good programming channels):

• Python Conferences (PyCon) - These are my favourites. The python conference is held annually, where industry professionals gather to share about their experiences and projects using python! I would recommend watching the more recent ones, such as 2017-2019.
• Sentdex - Deep Learning and Text Mining. In this channel, he goes through the process of text mining and neural networks step by step! If you just follow him, you’ll be done with a project in no time at all.
• MIT Open Courseware - MIT’s Open Courseware has uploaded some lectures here.
• Bill Ackman – Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour, and other interviews are informative. Listen to his analysis and reasoning, do you agree? Why or why not?
• Ray Dalio – Videos such as How The Economic Machine Works are useful in explaining business cycles!

6. Own a Project

A project is one of the best ways to put what you’ve learnt into practice! This gives you a way to showcase your skills and give companies a glimpse into your full potential.

• Keen on Communications? Write a blog series, write in to the Straits Times Forums or Today Online Opinion, publish articles on social media with knowledge gained from courses (Writing for Social Media)
• Want to make it in Marketing? Think of a company product and a marketing strategy (Come up with posters, videos on YouTube, run social media campaigns with an Instagram account)
• Finding your way into Finance? Publish a research about a company of your choice using a variety of valuation methods (See NUS Investment Society for examples).
• Interested in Investments? You don’t need money to begin. Start a paper portfolio of investments using an online simulation to log your trades made. You'll be able to gain experience, and have proof to show your skill!
• Setting your sights on Software Engineering? Think of a useful application and code it out! This can be your own personal website, a simple mobile app for tracking finances, and more.
• Determined about Data? Find a dataset from Kaggle and analyse it! Also, you can compete in the competitions they have hosted.

It doesn't matter if you have achieved stellar results or not. What matters is having the initiative to try. I once made the mistake of excluding projects from my resume because I did not think it was large enough. When a company I was interviewing for asked for projects, I showed them one and they were very impressed that I tried!

After completing your project, remember to publish an article on websites such as medium, write a LinkedIn article, and upload it on GitHub if your project has code! This helps your project gain more visibility and lends more credibility to all the work you've accomplished. Also, remember to share these articles with your LinkedIn network as well!

7. Participate In Relevant Competitions

Competitions are still on-going, and are great ways to validate your capabilities and gain recognition. If unsure of the on-going competitions that are relevant to your interests, ask your university career advisors! They will know of on-going competitions. Here are some I know of (Again, only programming-related):

• Kaggle Data Science Competitions - Compete worldwide against fellow data scientists, and read through interesting solutions!
• SCDF x IBM Hackathon - A hackathon for SCDF regarding pressing concerns around crisis management and climate change responsiveness.
• DSTA BrainHack - Explore interesting challenges about cyber security, artificial intelligence, satellite technologies, app development, fake news detection, 3D printing and more!
• Shopee Ultrahackathon - Transform e-commerce and hack up unique features for the Shopee application! (Although postponed until further notice. Keep a look out!)

8. Volunteer In Relevant Roles

Volunteering is a good way to make significant impact, while simultaneously gaining experience. If you know of charities/grassroots organisations/movements that need help, volunteer your skills. If you can code, volunteer in Code in the Community where you can teach children how to code in Scratch or Python. Help a charity with their social media account management. Offer to improve the user interface and user experience of a website. Suggest designing a marketing campaign for a small business unable to afford it in these trying times. Many of these organisations need help and people to contribute. You can be the one to make a difference. Just take the initiative and reach out to these organisations to find out where they need help.

9. Continue Preparing and Applying For Internships

Even though it’s nearing summer, it doesn’t mean that companies stop recruiting and you should stop applying! There may be sudden manpower needs, or an intern that is suddenly unable to commit in a crucial role. Expect these opportunities to come by and keep looking out for them. If not for a full-time summer role, try for a part-time summer role, or even intern during the next semester. If your university wants you to graduate on time, overload for the rest of your semesters, go on winter exchange to clear modules, claim future summer internships for modular credits. Do whatever it takes to gain the experience that you need. If you are not able to secure your desired internship role, try for your second, third, fourth best option. As a rule of thumb, if you have not applied for 30 companies, you have not applied for enough companies.

Here are some job sites you can use:

• NUS TalentConnect or your respective university career portal. Another great place to look at are the NUS startups.
• LinkedIn Jobs - Searching for intern and sorting by recency of post, there have been more than 200 postings in the past 24 hours alone in Singapore (Although some are posts that have been bumped up).
• Indeed - One of the largest job websites around with a large variety of listings
• Careers@Gov - For jobs with the public service!
• MyCareersFuture - A GovTech and Workforce Singapore career website. They display a wide variety of job listings with salary ranges.
• Glints - Headquartered in Singapore, their website is very user friendly and has a variety of listings! You can also try to intern at Glints.
• StartUpJob - An excellent job portal for those keen on the startup experience!

Prepare for internship interviews as if you already have one. Email your career advisors and schedule online mock interviews. Take the break that you have to prepare for interview questions. Accomplish any of the above pointers to boost your resume. Reach out to companies asking them if they are still recruiting, even if it’s for free. Let me take this chance to persuade you to do this with my next point.

10. Intern For Free (But negotiate first)

In my opinion, interning for free is acceptable if you do not have other options; this is a great way to gain experience! However, you may not need to resort to this yet. This is because we still see internship postings, indicating that companies are still hiring and paying for interns (although not as widely as before). While there are available positions, some companies have been affected badly and cannot afford to pay and hire extra talent. Now imagine a company that is cash strapped and needs help. It will be easier to secure an internship with them, and you’ll be able to gain the experience you need. Now let me emphasise this key point. You must know yourself well and negotiate if necessary. Here is the rationale why you should, and a rough framework to follow:

1. You may not be satisfied working for free! You can start by asking companies for a small allowance (e.g enough for just meals and transport), and work your way down from there.
2. Ask for more benefits! Ask for a reference letter you can use for future applications, try suggesting a three or four day work week so that you have time for projects, ask for negotiable allowance a few weeks in based on performance. Remember to be reasonable as well.
3. Clarify the terms of the contract and request for additional details about the job scope. Will you be required to work overtime and on weekends? Are you allowed to put this experience on your resume and on LinkedIn?
4. Mention to employers that you have applied to other companies as well. If terms given are undesirable, you can always look for other opportunities. While you need experience, companies need manpower. You are in a position of value as well.
5. Once secured, prepare yourself mentally. When working, be it for a lower allowance or for free, remember that you’re doing this to gain experience and maintain a positive attitude. Know that the experience is worth it if this helps you secure a good job in future. If you don't, the lack of allowance may get to you. This highlights the importance of knowing yourself well and negotiating; if you negotiate but still end up with terms you’re not happy with, do not sign and continue looking.

11. Moving Forward: Building a Killer Resume

Remember the situation; you don’t have an internship and you had to self-learn to gain experience. Make sure future employers know this! Remember to show your learning journey. While you did not have an opportunity to intern, with grit and determination you continued to build up your experiences over the summer. Here’s an example of how your resume can look like:

Not sure about you, but to me this is a summer very well spent. Do think out of the box, and think of projects where you can showcase your skills! Yes, this includes creating your own website, YouTube channel, and social media pages for the project if necessary. Just imagine how much you’ll learn from it, and how impressed future employers would be.

12. Conclusion

As you may be able to tell, I have a slight bias towards finance, programming and marketing since they’re part of my curriculum and knowledge areas. Although the examples given are focused, the tips here are universal and can be applied to your relevant fields. That’s all I have to share! Stay tuned for a programming/data science focused guide, and do let me know if there’s anything I have missed out so that I can add on more to the list (Courses you know of, other resources, competitions etc). If you have found this helpful, do share this article with others so that they will be able to benefit as well! To end off, I’d like to share my favourite quote and one that I live closely by:

It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to have an opportunity and not be prepared

– Les Brown

Keep stretching, keep improving yourself and keep preparing yourself for when things get better. Because when it does, you’ll be ready. You’ll be the one to come up tops. Stay safe and have fun!

Edit: I haven't had the time to write a programming/data science guide for those who would like to learn, but here are some useful resources to start with:

1. Python For Beginners 1 - Microsoft
2. Python For Beginners 2 - Microsoft
3. Python For Beginners (Data Tools) - Microsoft
4. Introduction To Python - EdX
5. Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists