I first came in touch with viesure during CodeMaster Boot Camp in Talent Garden. There we had an opportunity to meet all different kinds of companies and have an interview with them to know them better, alongside the learning we did. My main reason for reaching out to viesure was the fact that they had an Artificial Intelligence team.

Before doing the Boot Camp, I was a Mechanical Engineering student. Mechanical Engineering studies are notorious for their difficulty, and the long time it takes to get a degree. During my studies, I was pretty optimistic and was thinking that my hard work will pay off one day. But then I got an internship in a mechanical engineering company. After a few months of working there, I started to feel disappointed, because I saw that the day-to-day life of a mechanical engineer is not what I expected it to be. I couldn’t picture my future doing mechanical engineering, and I started to feel less and less keen to finish my Bachelor studies. I needed to find another path in life. After taking some time to think about my future, I decided to go back to the thing I loved when I was younger, and I thought I could be good at – programming and mathematics.

After researching the IT field and all the opportunities, I concluded that the best path for me was Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It seemed so interesting to me because it included a lot of maths, coding and research. All the things that I liked to do. The field is also developing pretty fast, and it gives a lot of new challenges and opportunities. I enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence Bachelor Degree program at Johannes Kepler University in Linz and also started the coding boot camp.

My goal doing boot camp was to jumpstart my career and get into the IT field quickly and then switch to AI entirely after some time. The vision didn’t turn out as planned, but in some ways, I can say it turned out better.

I got introduced to viesure in Talent Garden, and I was given an opportunity to do an internship in their Artificial Intelligence team.

I was excited about my new role, but unfortunately, like the plans of all people in the world, my plans also got affected by the coronavirus epidemics.

From day one, I was in the home office, which made my adaptation to the new role and tasks a little bit more difficult. But as time went along, it got easier. I had support from colleagues in my team. They helped me whenever I had some questions and if I was not sure how to do something I could always count on them.

My tasks were mostly about preparing data sets that will be used in model training. I also did some programming, i.e. writing a function for computing the confusion matrix and its components. This was useful for me because I got to see how things work in the real world and how subjects that are taught in University are being implemented. Additionally, I came in touch with several tools that are helpful and used regularly but are not taught in classes. I experienced working in a team and cooperating with other teams within the company, which I consider to be another significant learning. As students, we are mostly focused on acquiring technical skills that we will need in our careers, but we often forget about the fact that in the future, we will be a part of a team. Having the right attitude and development of social skills is something that will bring us a long way. I would say that it will be one of the main takeouts for me.

One more valuable thing is that I had access to much high-quality educational material through some online learning platform. Since I am the type of person that learns the most through reading, I made good use of it and went through a few books to improve my knowledge.

I also had my first Hackathon experience, which I found interesting, and I got a chance to meet and cooperate with other colleagues outside my team. My part was to come up with UX/UI design for an app, and there I got to apply some of the knowledge I have about front end development.

Now, as I approach the end of my internship at viesure, I can say that I am grateful that I was given this opportunity. I got the chance to see how things work in the AI field, what parts of my knowledge I have to improve, what the skills are that I have to develop to bring greater value to a company, and thus to have a successful career. It all gave me a greater picture, and I have learned many things in a short amount of time.

Since I am still a beginner in the field, I have a long way to go and a lot to learn, but this internship gave me first-hand insights and experience, and after all, I can say that I am on the right path and I am looking forward to new challenges that building the career in AI will bring me.