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How to get an Internship in Data Science

Over the last month, I've got to work with the Data Science hiring team at my company through resume reviews and interviews. Through this experience I've learned a lot about what gets you to the final rounds. Here's what I've learned!

1. Appeal to Recruiters

Here's what every resume I've seen has in common that recruiters care about:

Each resume has...

1. Followed a Structured, Plain Resume Format That's Easy to Read

This is the one area that you want to be just like everyone else. Use a default template with 5 sections:

  1. Header/Contact Information
  2. (optional) Summary of Skills
  3. Project/Internship Experience
  4. Skills
  5. School/Extra-Curricular

Let the content get you a job.

Story Time

My sophomore year in college I made a really beautiful, unique and fun resume with different fonts and colors. After a large career fair I got 2 interviews. For the next career fair, I switched to the default, plain, and simple resume template and got near 10 interviews and 3 internship offers. Simple is king.

2. Shown Experience From Both Inside and Outside of the Classroom

The bar is high for getting internships. It's not good enough to simply do your homework, most companies want to see passion that is demonstrated by work outside of your school work.

3. Used Keywords That Relate to the Job Description

Since most recruiters aren't experts within the field they're hiring for, they're often looking for keywords within your resume to ensure you're a good fit for the position. This is important. If you want to boost your chances, customize your resumes for the job that you're applying for.

4. Had Projects/Experiences that Highlight They Work Well with Others

This is another thing recruiters are looking for, so make sure you're informing them you can work well with others through successful projects.

Bonus Tips

Highlight Leadership Skills

Include any experience in which you've been a leader, through work, school, or extra-curricular activities.

Show participation in extra-curricular activities in Data Science

Make sure you're making use of any clubs or programs outside of required classes. Join competitive programming, software development clubs, or most importantly AI related clubs.

2. Appeal to Technical Experts

Be Specific

For project experience, discuss technologies you used & learned and discuss outcomes. If there's a line that isn't clear or doesn't contribute to a better understanding of your skills or experience, remove it.

If you don't have projects, build some! These are super important for getting internships and gaining practical experience with problems. What I did was build games like snake, flappy bird, 2D racing & tic-tac-toe and built AI agents to beat the games. It might sounds simple, but it was how I applied what I was learning within school and it gave me things to talk about during the interview.

List Skills the Interviewer is Looking for

When applying for a data science, software engineering or machine learning engineering internship you should first look at the skills that they're looking for. If you have any of those skills, list them at the top of the skills section. At this point, the fact that you're good with Microsoft Word is not very helpful information, so remove that.

If you can, showing links to your projects and links to your GitHub is a nice extra touch. Our team has at times gathered around to look at projects that interviewees have worked on, so this is a great place to stand out!

3. Be Prepared to Talk Knowledgeably About Anything on Your Resume

One of the worst thing that you can do, is put something on your resume that you're not able to talk about. If it's a group project, take the time to know details about what your teammates worked on. If it's something you worked on, you should be able to talk about what you contributed, what you learned, and what the outcomes were.

If there's something you don't know much about within a project, don't highlight it. That sets you up for a dead end conversation during the interview.

We spend time reviewing every resume to come up with follow-up questions to gauge understanding. Make it easy for your interviewers by giving them plenty of things to ask you about.

4. You've Got the Interview, Now Kill It 🔥

Slow Down

Pause and think before responding to questions. A second of silence to compose your thoughts doesn't hurt and is far better then non-intelligent babbling while you come up with something.

Ask Questions

If you don't understand something, ask a clarifying question. Sometimes a problem requires more information, and that's okay. It's better to ask a clarifying question then start talking about the wrong thing.

Highlight Your Understanding

Don't just answer questions, highlight your understanding by going in depth. Give reasoning behind your answers.

Be Confident, You Got This 😎

Hope this helps, good luck! 👋

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